Land Use Change Feedbacks with Climate

Dear Colleagues,

Land cover and land use influence the biogeochemical fluxes and the surface energy balance at the land/atmosphere boundary. Land use change can thus trigger biological, chemical, or physical feedbacks to the climate system via the atmosphere. In turn, climate change has begun to influence land use decisions as people are beginning to adapt to unavoidable global climate change in a warmer world with more weather extremes. Examples of such feedback processes are the urban heat island effect, the albedo feedback and the carbon cycle feedbacks. However, land use change is not only driven by climate change adaptation policies. It is influenced by a complex web of factors, including economic globalization, natural resource availability, commodity prices, regional infrastructure, social population demography and individual preferences, and government policies. Land is a limited resource and is becoming precious as the world’s population is growing. Multiple and often conflicting demands on land use mean that decisions have to be taken. The United Nations initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), for example, places a different demand on tropical forest land than the rising demand for biofuels and food products.
This Special Issue provides an interdisciplinary perspective on land use change at local, regional, national and global scales and how it feeds back to the climate system. It applies a range of modeling, remote sensing, socio-economic and other methods to the problem of human/environment interactions, driving land use change and its implications for future scenarios of climate change.

Prof. Dr. Heiko Balzter
Guest Editor

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.