Understanding Disasters in a Changing Landscape: Causes, Impacts and Mitigation Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites contributions that delve into the multifaceted realm of land-related disasters and their aftermath. We are increasingly seeing climate or human-driven changes in land cover or land uses, which are often accompanied by risks that are difficult to predict, model, assess in terms of their complex impacts, and mitigate.

Land change-related hazards include floods, soil erosion, sediment transport, geomorphological changes, and landslides that occur after, e.g., wildfires, desertification, or other human-driven alterations, such as deforestation and urbanization. Such hazards are associated with vast economic losses, extensive infrastructure damage, and the loss of human lives.

This call encourages interdisciplinary research, from fields such as environmental science, geography, geology, engineering, and urban planning. We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners to contribute their insights, methodologies, and innovative solutions to foster a deeper understanding of the broader spectrum of land-related disasters and promote resilient communities. A cross-disciplinary, geographically extended, and gender-balanced group of experts will be invited to contribute to this novel call, with papers related to the improved understanding of land-related changes and their subsequent natural hazards, in terms of modelling, new technologies and applications, management, impact assessment, risk evaluation, mitigation strategies, and state-of-the-art advances in the recent literature.

The present Special Issue is expected to be a novel, broad, and interdisciplinary call, addressing an emerging issue that has received limited attention in the literature so far, as the post-land use change impacts and hazards span across the broad readership of the Land journal.

Prof. Dr. Fotis Maris
Prof. Dr. Panagiotis Angelidis
Dr. George Papaioannou
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-blind 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.