Human Activity-Driven Land Use Change: Insights and Perspectives from Novel Data and Methodologies
A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land Innovations – Data and Machine Learning".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 16 September 2026 | Viewed by 224
Special Issue Editors
Interests: land use change; urban green space; sustainable development; inequality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: climate change; land use; forestry; ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
With a rapidly growing global population and intensifying socioeconomic pressures, understanding the dynamic interplay between human activities and land systems has become crucial for sustainability science. Nevertheless, conventional land change models struggle to capture the complexity of contemporary human drivers. These limitations hinder the predictive capacity and effective decision-making for addressing climate change and advancing sustainable development.
Multi-source, high-resolution two- and three-dimensional data, combined with social sensing data, provide unprecedented opportunities to map, quantify, and conceptualize these elusive processes. Concurrently, advances in machine learning and causal inference modeling empower researchers to more precisely decode the impact mechanisms between human activities and land systems.
This Special Issue welcomes interdisciplinary manuscripts that advance the understanding of human–environment interactions through empirical, methodological, or theoretical contributions. We particularly encourage submissions leveraging emerging data sources—such as 2D/3D satellite data (e.g., Sentinel, LiDAR) and multi-sourced geospatial data—alongside social sensing datasets including POIs and social media data. Research employing innovative methodologies like geospatial analysis, machine learning, big-data analytics, and causal inference techniques is also highly valued. By synthesizing diverse data and analytical approaches, this Special Issue aims to advance the theoretical and empirical understanding of human–environment interactions across multiple spatial–temporal scales.
This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:
- Impacts of multi-dimensional urbanization on ecological quality and ecosystem services under climate change;
- Leveraging multi-source remote sensing and social sensing data to quantify human–land interaction dynamics across spatial–temporal scales;
- Assessing land system resilience and adaptation;
- Decoding causal mechanisms between human activities and land use change using machine learning and causal inference modeling;
- GIS-based and spatial analytical approaches for sustainable land management.
We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.
Dr. Zhiqi Yang
Dr. Brice B. Hanberry
Dr. Wenpeng Du
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.
Keywords
- human–environment systems
- land use change
- urban sustainability
- socio-ecological resilience
- machine learning
- driving factors
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