Trends in Land Change Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Land change plays an important role in a wide variety of issues, such as biosphere–atmosphere interaction, biodiversity, ecosystem functionality, land surface energy balance, biogeochemical cycles, and sustainable development. Furthermore, land change is shaped by and in turn reflects natural and human forces. With the development of society and the growth of the world population, substantial land change has occurred at local, regional, and global scales. Monitoring land change trends helps us to comprehend change drivers and the interaction between land change and environment, contributing to regional or global change research programs and environment protection policy making. As science and technology rapidly develop, oceans of new data sources and methods come into existence. Various high-quality and open data, such as high special or temporal resolution satellite images and volunteered geographic information, provide more choices for researchers. State-of-the-art methods such as deep learning and Google Earth Engine reduce calculation time and improve accuracy. However, these data sources and methods have not been widely applied in monitoring land change trends, and current analysis and results are not fine, accurate, and timely enough for practical application.

For this Special Issue, our aim is to discuss these two questions: (1) How can we accurately monitor, quantify and simulate trends in land change? (2) How can we find and explain the different drivers of land change?

Papers may address topics including but not limited to:

• Mapping land use/cover change;
• Monitoring land use transition using remote sensing technology;
• Monitoring changes in key land types such as abandoned cropland, rural settlement and wetland;
• Land use/cover classification using state-of-the-art methods such as deep learning and Google Earth Engine;
• Tracking land use/cover trajectory using remote sensing technology and big data;
• Analyzing driving forces of land use/cover change;
• Modelling land change;
• Assessing environmental and ecological effects of land change.

Prof. Dr. Li Wang
Dr. Wei Song
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.