Dear Colleagues,

Land resources, local economy, and responsible tourism planning, as evolving approaches to modern sustainable development, aim to provide economic, social, cultural, and environmental advantages to community members while enhancing sustainable principles at the local level. Despite the increasing diversity of publishing in the field in recent decades, insight into the nature of contemporary local planning remains incomplete in the literature to date. Therefore, it highlights the need for more research to be conducted to further advance the literature by addressing significant research issues and challenges. This encourages the current Special Issue. Integrating empirical and theoretical thinking about a variety of land uses and the associated wellbeing of local communities provides the focus for this Special Issue. Conceptual and empirical, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies are welcome. The Special Issue will be particularly focused on original contributions to local case studies, community-based initiatives, and tourism theory. Submissions should be novel (but can extend existing research programs) and at the intersection of rural land uses and the welfare of small communities with implications that are generalizable beyond a specific region.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Connections between land uses and concepts of inclusion, resilience, and other ideas to the local economy, governance, or society;
• Lessons learned from multi- or transdisciplinary perspectives and reconciliations of concepts from different disciplines as applied to non-urban community organizations and perspectives;
• Modern trends in rural geography and regional development;
• Planning and policy of vendors and marketplaces and their broader connections to land use;
• Role of rural tourism in the sustainability principles: worldwide examples and comparisons;
• Rural geographical research fostering resilience in the face of rural communities' problems and events;
• Stakeholder involvement in the rural economy and community-based development;
• The evolution and future of vendors and/or marketplaces with implications for land use;
• The processes of assessing rural strategies' contributions to sustainability.

Dr. Marko D. Petrović
Dr. Alfonso Morales
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.

• community-based development
• local economy
• tourism initiatives
• vendors and local markerplaces
• land issues
• rural geography