Land-Use Change and Ecosystem Services

Dear Colleagues,

Human beings are significantly changing the terrestrial land cover by transforming vast wild areas into human-dominated land-use types. Intense land-use change can increase soil and nutrient erosion and reduce crop yield, and conversions between different land-use types can degrade ecosystem function and erode biodiversity. Maintaining balance between land use and ecosystem services is critical to our sustainable socio-economic development. Although many scientists have worked on related topics, more efforts are still needed to get detailed knowledge of land-use change and its effects. The advancements of big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies will help enhance the reliability and replicability of our findings. This Special Issue aims to collect high-quality research targeting the use of big data and deep learning in land-use analyses.

Potential studies should focus on the following and other relevant themes:

• Land-use change and its relevant impacts on ecosystem services;
• Environmental degradation caused by land-use change;
• Land-use induced biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformation;
• Drivers of land-use change;
• Sustainable interaction between land use and ecosystem function;
• The use of big data and cloud computing in land-use analysis;
• Deep-learning-based land use and ecosystem analytic models.

Dr. Yuanxu Ma
Dr. Shaohua Wang
Dr. Xun Zhang
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. 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.