Land Quality, Environmental Degradation, and Sustainable Land Management in Agricultural Landscapes

Dear Colleagues,

Lands, both agricultural and non-agricultural, are crucial for human wellbeing and for the stability of the Earth’s climate system. Agricultural land is of vital importance for food production and food security, considering that most of the world's food comes from land, and only a tiny share from oceans and seas. These terrestrial systems are also fundamental for combating global climate change, since agricultural soils constitute a major carbon pool globally.

However, these key attributes of agricultural lands continue to be severely altered in many regions of the world, amid the emergence or intensification of multiple land degradation pathways, due to climate change and various anthropogenic pressures. These pathways correspond to a wide spectrum of environmental processes that cause a long-term decline in agricultural productivity and carbon sequestration capacity of lands. Consequently, the current widespread trend of land degradation is significantly eroding humanity’s chances to meet its goals in terms of food security, climate stability, and sustainable development, throughout this century.

In this context, the main objective of this Special Issue is to create new knowledge on the multiple forms of agricultural land degradation, which currently alter agricultural landscapes from local to global scale. At the same time, this Special Issue aims to address practical solutions for the protection, restoration, and rehabilitation of degraded lands, which can combat land degradative conditions and ensure a land degradation-neutral world, according to the current United Nations policies.

We therefore invite researchers to submit papers (original research articles, letters, short communications, commentaries or reviews) that tackle the following or other similar general topics:

• Causes (climatic and anthropogenic) of land degradation processes;
• Land degradation pathways/processes (water erosion, wind erosion, soil salinization, soil pollution, soil organic carbon loss, soil aridification, desertification etc) in agricultural systems;
• Agricultural impacts (regarding agricultural yields, food security, food production sustainability, etc.) of land degradation;
• Climate impacts (through soil carbon losses) of degraded agricultural lands;
• Sustainable measures/practices for the stabilization (protection, restoration and rehabilitation) of agricultural lands.

Dr. Remus Pravalie
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.