Land and Green Infrastructure Synergies: Advancing Ecological and Social Sustainability in Urban Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Cities increasingly rely on green infrastructure (GI). GI includes parks and greenways, street trees, riparian buffers, green roofs, and urban agriculture—all of which are implemented to meet connected ecological and social goals. This Special Issue examines how land systems and GI can be planned, designed, governed, and maintained in synergy to advance urban sustainability. We invite contributions that quantify and qualify the multiple benefits of GI (e.g., biodiversity, ecosystem services, heat and flood mitigation, water quality, and carbon management) alongside social outcomes (e.g., health and well-being, access, equity, and community resilience). Submissions may address multi-scalar planning and connectivity, trade-offs and co-benefits across land uses, performance monitoring and metrics, financing and stewardship models, and policy and regulatory frameworks. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary and practice-oriented research employing spatial analytics, GIS and remote sensing, ecological and hydrologic modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence, participatory and community-based methods, and comparative case studies from diverse geographies. By foregrounding land–GI synergies, this Special Issue seeks actionable, replicable evidence and design principles that help cities deliver nature-based solutions that are equitable, climate-resilient, and durable over time. We especially seek integrative studies that operationalize socioecological–technical systems thinking and share open, reusable data or code aligned with fair research principles.  New methodologies and developed tools that advance measurement, modeling, monitoring, and decision-support for land–GI systems are highly valuable to this Special Issue. Submissions presenting rigorously validated methods, open source code, or transferable toolkits that provide replication, scaling, and practical uptake by planners and communities will be prioritized.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link, but are not limited to, the following themes:

1. Multi-scalar GI planning and design: multifunctionality, connectivity, and habitat networks.
2. Quantifying co-benefits and trade-offs: ecosystem services, biodiversity, heat/flood risk, water quality, and carbon.
3. Equity, access, environmental justice, and community resilience: distributional impacts over time.
4. Land–energy–water nexus.
5. Governance, policy, regulation, financing, stewardship, and lifecycle maintenance of GI.
6. Monitoring and performance metrics: remote sensing, citizen sensing, and reproducible indicators.
7. Modeling and decision-support: hydrologic/ecological models, scenario analysis, optimization, and digital twins.
8. GeoAI and machine learning for GI mapping, suitability, forecasting, and interpretable analytics.
9. Participatory approaches: PPGIS, co-production, living labs, and practice–academia partnerships.
10. Blue–green infrastructure and nature-based solutions for climate adaptation/mitigation.
11. Methods/data notes and open source toolkits enabling replication and transfer across contexts.

Article types: Original research articles, reviews, and case studies.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Anton Rozhkov
Dr. Patricia Baptista
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.

• green infrastructure
• urban sustainability
• land use and land cover change
• climate adaptation and resilience
• environmental justice and equity
• spatial analysis and GIS
• blue–green infrastructure
• participatory modeling and co-production
• GeoAI and machine learning