Dear Colleagues,

The “Land” is where human beings stand, act and grow. The term land encompasses all physical elements bestowed by nature; therefore, it supports all aspects of our life.

Land cover and land use are the fundamental information required  in the monitoring and planning of natural resources, agriculture production, forest management, emergency responses, green cities development, climate change, and achieving and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in addition to many other initiatives and goals at the local to global levels.

The advancement in remote sensing (RS), geographical information system (GIS) and machine learning techniques provides more and more remarkable and crucial information in understanding the complex dynamics of the environment. Despite those innovations, however, there is a lot of effort still to be made in the “formalization of the meaning” of that information, how they are conceptualized and shared. The compatibility of land products become increasingly crucial as the amount of available information rises, but inconsistencies still exist affecting their comparability and efficient functional use.

During the past decade, new innovative methods and tools to characterize and functionally define/classify land cover (and land use) information have emerged. Those efforts can potentially redefine many aspects of how the user community generates and utilizes land information. Therefore, reviewing and understanding the potentialities of those advances, as well as their impacts in the generation/utilization of “Land” information, is critical.

The aim of this Special Issue is to encourage the science and research community to provide their inputs through innovative ideas and proposals in the development of consistent, sustainable and interoperable land cover and land use datasets using integrated approaches and implementing existing standards to support various ongoing local to global land cover and land use initiatives. This subject is highly related to the scope of the journal in the context of ;and system science and social–ecological system research; land/land-use/land-cover change; land management including agriculture, forestry, the built environment and others; land–climate interactions, including climate–biosphere–biodiversity interactions; assessment and evaluation frameworks, indicators, indices, methods, tools and approaches (ecosystem services, multifunctionality and sustainability); and emerging technologies of data processing (deep learning/machine-based learning).

In this Special Issue, we invite papers regarding, but not limited to, the following topics:

• innovative ways to define/characterize land cover/land use ontologies;
• multi-disciplinary research that investigates the intrinsic relationship between land cover and land use;
• use of new standards and new methodologies for the functional integration of earth observation data, field data, remote sensing and other ancillary information;
• automatic comparison and similarity assessment of existing different land cover ontologies using ISO standard (ISO 19144-2).LCML (Land Cover Meta Language) to assure semantic interoperability and harmonization of data sets from national to global level;
• role, importance and use cases of land information for Sustainable Development Goals, climate action (SDG 13) and life on land (SDG 15).

Dr. Antonio Di Gregorio
Dr. Matieu Henry
Guest Editors

Chris T. Hill
Prof. John Latham
Prof. Dr. Mohammed Abed Hossain
Dr. Khalid Mahmood
Dr. Foster Mensah
Co-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.

• land cover
• land use
• interoperability
• standardization
• geospatial technology
• semantic ontology
• harmonization
• classification
• earth observation
• remote sensing
• sustainable development