Agroecosystem Services: Optimizing Cropland within Diverse Landscape Contexts
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Landscape Ecology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 May 2027 | Viewed by 26
Editors
Interests: ecosystem services; land use optimization; agriculture management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: land use optimization modeling
Interests: land use optimization; rural development
Interests: agroforestry; biodiversity; agroecosystems; social forestry
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Agroecosystem services are fundamental to global food security, environmental sustainability, and rural livelihoods. Optimising cropland management to enhance this multifunctionality is a central challenge. Increasingly, research highlights that the performance of croplands—in terms of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services—is deeply interconnected with the composition and configuration of the broader landscape. Understanding and managing these landscape-level interactions is critical for navigating trade-offs between agricultural production, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem resilience in the face of global change.
The goal of this Special Issue is to collect original research and review papers that provide novel insights into the strategies for optimizing cropland management within diverse landscape mosaics. We aim to compile cutting-edge research that advances both theory and practice, contributing to the journal's scope of land-system science, sustainability, and the interactions between human activities and the environment. This Special Issue seeks to enhance our understanding of how landscape context can be leveraged to design more sustainable and resilient agricultural systems.
This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:
- Empirical assessments and modeling of agroecosystem service bundles and trade-offs across spatial scales.
- Analysis of landscape configuration effects (e.g., habitat connectivity, field size/shape, non-crop elements) on ecosystem services such as pollination, pest control, and nutrient cycling.
- Evaluation of land-use strategies, including land sharing vs. land sparing paradigms, and ecological intensification practices.
- The role of crop and non-crop diversity at field and landscape scales for system stability and multifunctionality.
- Socio-ecological analyses of the drivers, barriers, and outcomes of adopting landscape-optimized farming practices.
- Methodological advances in monitoring, mapping, and valuing landscape-dependent agroecosystem services.
We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.
Dr. Zhuoran Yan
Dr. Zhaomin Tong
Dr. Jingbo Yin
Dr. Marco Campera
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- agroecosystem services
- cropland optimisation
- landscape diversity
- land sharing and sparing
- crop diversification
- ecological intensification
- landscape configuration
- multi-objective trade-offs
- sustainable agriculture
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