Advances in Ecosystem Services and Urban Sustainability, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid growth of cities, the urban ecosystem is becoming one of the most important habitats for human beings. It combines natural and anthropogenic components that interact with one another, providing both natural and artificial benefits that influence the quality of urban life. Under the carbon neutrality targets of various countries across the world, nature-based solutions (NBSs) will play an increasingly important role in addressing climate change. NBSs constitute a type of ecosystem-based blue and green infrastructure (BGI) involving interconnected networks of natural and artificial landscape components. The natural processes and aspects of BGI underpin their functions, which in turn results in most urban ESs. Under the pressure of urban expansion and climate change, better information on how ESs contribute to the urban ecosystem and human well-being is crucial for decision-making and urban planning and will likely improve sustainable urban development. This Special Issue will present an up-to-date overview of advances in ecosystem services and urban sustainability by bringing together conceptual, epistemological, methodological, and predominantly case-based studies or applied perspectives.

The editors of this Topic encourage submissions focused on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• New definition, characterization, or mapping of urban forms, urban ecosystem services, or urban management.
• Novel approaches to identify the main drivers of land cover/land use change for sustainable urban development in urban planning throughout history.
• Innovative concepts, methods, or technologies to analyze and model urban land cover/land use change, human–nature interaction, or social–ecological system dynamics.
• Disentangling the synergy and trade-offs among social progress, regional development, environmental management, and urban planning.
• New concepts, technologies, approaches, and developments of NBS.
• New technologies, methodologies, and tools to support BGI planning in sustainable urban development.

Dr. Yafei Wang
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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.