Dear Colleagues,

In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Land, we are pleased to increase the number of prizes for the Land 2021 Best Paper Award. Three reviews and three research articles will each receive an award. The papers will be selected after thorough evaluation by an award committee consisting of senior scholars from the Land Editorial Board.

Eligibility for the Award:

– Papers published in Land from 1 January to 31 December 2021;
– Open to all career levels;
– Both regular and Special Issue (SI) submissions will be considered.

Selection Criteria:

The papers will be selected by the journal award committee according to the following criteria:
– Scientific merit and broad impact;
– Relevance to the SI and journal scope;
– Originality of the research objectives and/or the ideas presented (for research articles);
– Creativity of the study design or uniqueness of the approaches and concepts (for research articles);
– Comprehensiveness, for review articles;
– Citations (data source: Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics)) and download rates in 2020.

Review:

– First Prize: CHF 600 + one free publication.
– Second Prize: CHF 400 + one free publication.
– Third Prize: one free publication.

Article:

– First Prize: CHF 500 + one free publication.
– Second Prize: CHF 300 + one free publication.
– Third Prize: one free publication.

Please notice that three reviews and three articles will be selected for this award, and the winners (corresponding authors) will be granted a bonus based on the award class, as well as an offer to publish a paper free of charge in Land in 2023, subject to the normal peer-review procedure.

The winners will be announced by the end of March 2023.

Dear Colleagues,

In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Land, and on behalf of the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington, we wish to acknowledge our reviewers who so generously give their time to review papers submitted to Land. The Land 2021 10th Anniversary Outstanding Reviewer Award will be presented to reviewers who have demonstrated exceptional dedication, professionalism and timeliness in reviewing manuscripts for Land.

What are the prerequisites to be eligible for the award?

– All of the reviewers for Land in 2021 will be automatically included.

Selection Criteria:

– Number of review reports (only first review reports are considered);
– Review quality based on the rating given in SuSy;
– Review speed.

What will the winners receive?

There will be three winners this year, and each will receive the following:
– 500 Swiss francs;
– Waiver of article processing fee for a manuscript submitted to Land before August 2022;
– A certificate.

When will the winners be announced?

– The winners will be announced in January 2022 on the journal website.

How can I make myself eligible?

– If you have not yet reviewed papers for Land but would like to do so, you can register as a reviewer at the following link: https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/profile/edit.

Kind regards,
Land Editorial Office

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the 2020 Best Paper Award for reviews and articles which were published in Land from 1 January to 31 December 2020. Two reviews and two articles will receive this award. The papers will be selected after thorough evaluation by the journal award committee chaired by Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington, and the winners will be announced by 31 August 2021.

Eligibility for the award
– Papers published in Land from 1 January to 31 December 2020;
– Open to all career levels;
– Both regular and Special Issue submissions will be considered.

Selection criteria
The papers will be selected by the journal award committee according to the following criteria:
– Originality and significance
– Citation and download rates till 30 June2021 (data source: Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics))

Prizes
Two reviews and two articles will be selected for this award and the winners (corresponding author) will be granted a bonus based on the award class as well as an offer to publish a paper free of charge in Land, subject to the normal peer review procedure.

Review:
– First Prize: 600 CHF + one free publication
– Second Prize: 400 CHF + one free publication

Article:
– First Prize: 500 CHF + one free publication
– Second Prize: 300 CHF + one free publication

The winners will be announced by 31 August 2021.

Dear Colleagues,

As the Editor-in-Chief of Land, I am pleased to announce the winners of the Land Travel Awards in 2021.

Álvaro Castilla Beltrán, a post-doctoral fellow in the Island Ecology and Biogeography Group, Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias, University of La Laguna, Spain.

Lauren Nerfa, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Botany, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, USA.

With so many high-quality applicants, the evaluation process and final decision were challenging. We would like to thank all of the applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. All in all, we were very impressed. On behalf of the Assessment Committee, I would like to congratulate the winners on their accomplishments.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief, Land

Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Land 2020 Outstanding Reviewer Award. The Land Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy dedicated by reviewers in checking the manuscripts submitted to Land. It is due to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick turnaround is maintained.

Carlo Rega
European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), Via E, Fermi 2749, Ispra, VA, Italy

Maria Rosa Trovato
Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Catania, Città Universitaria, Viale Andrea Doria, 6, 95125, Catania, Italy

Ileana Pătru-Stupariu
Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, ICUB, Transdisciplinary Research Centre Landscape-Territory-Information Systems, CeLTIS, 050095 Bucharest, Romania
Department of Regional Geography and Environment, Faculty of Geography, University of Bucharest, 010041 Bucharest, Romania

The first and second winners will receive the following:
– 500 Swiss francs (CHF);
– A certificate;
– A chance to publish a paper free-of-charge in Land in 2021.

The third winner will receive the following:
– A certificate;
– A chance to publish a paper free-of-charge in Land in 2021.

Kind regards,
Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief, Land

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Land, it gives me great pleasure to announce the three winners of the 2020 Travel Award sponsored by Land. Given the abundance of outstanding applicants, the award committee had to take particular care and consideration when deciding upon the winners.

The Travel Award was granted to Dr. Cynthia Isley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, Macquarie University, Australia; Ms. Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen, Ph.D. student in the Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Denmark; and Ms. Rebecca Riggs, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada.

Dr. Cynthia Isley’s research aims to identify and reduce contaminant exposure, benefiting society through providing scientifically tested advice to citizens living in contaminated areas. As well as being involved in the citizen science programs VegeSafe and DustSafe, which are focused on broadening community knowledge of contaminants and promoting safe gardening practices, Dr. Isley is investigating the most effective methods to remove perfluorinated substances (PFAS) from contaminated groundwater, an emerging global environmental concern of great significance to health and economic development.

Ms. Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen seeks to reveal the impacts of urban environmental changes on people’s health outcomes across the life course. Her work is characterized a synergy of machine learning, remote sensing, and human geography. In her current project, she is using Landsat time-series and deep learning approaches to investigate urban densification in Denmark and mental health trajectories during the rural–urban migration process. In her ongoing and future research, she is keen to understand how medium-sized cities transit, and how their influences on human well-being differ in European countries compared to the Global South.

Ms. Rebecca Riggs seeks to contribute to understanding the drivers of change in rural forest landscapes and the opportunities for sustainable development. For her doctoral research, Rebecca examined forest landscapes in Cambodia to understand local perceptions and institutional leverage points for nurturing landscape transitions for prosperity and sustainability. She is interested in how systems approaches support evidence-based decision making, including identifying social and environmental trade-offs and communicating evidence to decision-makers. Through her work, Rebecca hopes to demonstrate the value of place-based sustainability science and the importance of engaging with people in landscapes where changes are occurring.

The prize consists of 800 Swiss Francs each to support travel for attendance at an academic conference in 2020 or 2021. To encourage the passion of young researchers and enable their attendance at academic conferences, we rewarded three researchers in total.

The standard of applicants for this award was exceptionally high, with each exemplifying innovative practice and interesting approaches toward addressing land-based research issues. All of the shortlisted applicants would have been worthy recipients of this year’s travel award. This made the final decision difficult, and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting details of what was, collectively, a diverse and fascinating range of research topics. Finally, we wish to congratulate the winners on their accomplishments.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief, Land

Dear Colleagues,

The Land Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy given by reviewers in checking manuscripts submitted to Land. It is due to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick turnaround is maintained.

The following referees have been selected to receive Land 2019 Outstanding Reviewer Awards for the quantity, timeliness, and quality of their reviews in 2019:

The first and second winners will receive the following:

– 500 Swiss francs (CHF);

– A certificate;

– A chance to publish a paper free-of-charge in Land within a year.

Prof. Dr. Frank Vanclay

Director, Urban & Regional Studies Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Prof. Dr. Volker Beckmann

Faculty of Law and Economics & Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology, University of Greifswald, Soldmann Str. 15, 17487 Greifswald, Germany

A further one winner will receive the following:
–– A chance to publish a paper free of charge in Land within a year;
–– A certificate.

Dr. Antonio Santoro

Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry, University of

Florence, via San Bonaventura 13, 50145 Florence, Italy

The editorial team would like to congratulate the winners of the Land 2019 Best Paper Award, who were chosen by the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington. The recipients of the “Land 2019 Best Paper Award” are as follows:

Article:

– Rank 1 Award: (500 CHF + one free publication by 31 June 2021)
Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), Aichi Target 11 and Canada’s Pathway to Target 1: Focusing Conservation on Reconciliation (doi: 10.3390/land8010010)
– Rank 2 Award: (300 CHF + one free publication by 31 June 2021)
Agricultural Expansion in the Brazilian Cerrado: Increased Soil and Nutrient Losses and Decreased Agricultural Productivity (doi: 10.3390/land8010012)

Review:

– Rank 1 Award: (600 CHF + one free publication by 31 June 2021)
Understanding Land in the Context of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions: A Brief History of Land in Economics (doi: 10.3390/land8010015)
– Rank 2 Award: (400 CHF + one free publication by 31 June 2021)
Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media Data for Socio-Environmental Systems Research (doi: 10.3390/land8070107)

Please join us in congratulating the winners of Land 2019 Best Paper Award. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our authors for your continued support of Land.

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Land, I am pleased to announce the two winners of the 2019 Travel Awards sponsored by Land:

The Travel Awards were granted to Dr. Catalina Munteanu, Postdoctoral fellow in the Conservation Biogeography Lab, Geography Department, Humboldt-University Berlin, Berlin, Germany, and Ms. Elizabeth Tellman, PH.D. student in the Arizona State University School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Dr. Catalina Munteanu’s research aims to understand and disentangle the legacies of past human activities so that we can make better conservation and land management decisions for the future. Her work spans the disciplines of land use science, landscape ecology, and conservation science to address issues relevant at both regional and global scales. In her current project, EcoSpy She uses declassified historical, global, high-resolution spy satellite photographs from the Cold War era (Corona) at broad scales to extend the temporal scale of ecological and conservation remote sensing studies as far back as the 1960s.

Ms. Elizabeth Tellman seeks to understand the causes and consequences of environmental change. Her dissertation investigates illicit and clandestine drivers of land use change by examining electoral politics and urban expansion in Mexico City and narcotrafficking and deforestation in Central America. She will continue to shine a light on the hidden processes of change as satellites and data on land transactions increase in spatial and temporal resolution.

The prize consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to support travel for attendance at an academic conference in 2019.

It was a difficult decision with such high-quality applications for the awards and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. We congratulate the
winners for their accomplishments.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief of Land

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Land, I am pleased to announce the two winners of the 2018 Travel Awards sponsored by Land:

The Travel Awards were granted to Dr. Giulia Sofia, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova, Padova, Italy and Mrs. Khadiza Begum, Ph.D. student in the Institute of Biological and Environmental Science, School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.

Dr. Giulia Sofia’s research focusses on hydrogeomorphic feature extraction from high-resolution topography. Through such an approach, her most recent research aims to model and quantify interlocking relations between soil properties, the geometry of the drainage network and climatic inputs, to investigate how they determine the watershed response. She plans to expand this analysis to understand how network properties influence flood regimes at a larger scale.

Mrs. Khadiza Begum’s research area mainly focuses on greenhouse (GHG) mitigation potentials under improved management practices on Bangladesh rice crop land. The DayCent model was used to simulate covering 64 districts of Bangladesh, considering diverse soil types and climatic variability. Modelled results suggest that in an integrated management scenario consisting of reduced water, tillage with residue management, reduced fertilization offsets GHG emissions while maintaining yield. Further research is required to expand the model evaluation across robust measured datasets at a finer resolution.

The awards consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to support travel towards their attendance at an academic conference in 2018.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief of Land

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Travel Award sponsored by Land:
The Travel Award has been granted to Mr. Michael Lathuillière, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Mr. Michael Lathuillière focuses his research on land and water management in Southern Amazonia (Brazil) where soybean and pasture have been expanding since the 1990s. The objective of his Ph.D. research is to quantify how land use change has affected the regional water cycle by focusing on the transfer of water vapor to the atmosphere. He plans to complement this research with an analysis of the carbon cycle with the intention of quantifying the effects of regional agricultural expansion and intensification on land and water use, as well as carbon sequestration and emissions.