Search Results (310)

Population decline is reshaping rural development and requiring village planning to balance land-use efficiency with changing community needs. This study examines planning-led land-use restructuring in Gushanqian Village, a shrinking peri-urban village in Shandong Province, China. Under the Village Spatial Plan (2021–2035), commercial service land was reduced from 9.35 to 1.66 ha and industrial land increased from 1.42 to 10.30 ha, while the total area of construction land remained unchanged. By integrating planning-document analysis with a questionnaire survey of 132 villagers, the study connects documented statutory land-use adjustments with residents’ multidimensional perceptions, residential retention intention, and overall planning satisfaction. Firth logistic regression was used to analyse retention intention, while multiple linear regression was applied to planning satisfaction, with age and residential status included as covariates. More favourable perceptions of planning information, agricultural space, ecological space, and residential space were positively associated with retention intention, whereas industrial expansion perception was negatively associated with retention intention but showed the strongest positive association with overall planning satisfaction. This divergence highlights that support for an industrially oriented planning direction does not necessarily translate into a stronger intention to remain. The case demonstrates the value of examining the social implications of stock-oriented land reallocation alongside its spatial outcomes and provides a non-Western basis for comparison in research on planning responses to rural shrinkage. Full article

Peri-urban belts are where most metropolitan residents actually meet farmland, and where urban food policy and agroecological transition physically overlap. They are also where wild food plants (WFPs) grow: on verges, ditch bank, and field margins, the interstitial biodiversity that complements cultivated crops. We ask whether the knowledge that makes those plants usable survives peri-urbanisation, and whether it can serve as a proxy for the resilience of the surrounding agroecosystem. Two Northern Italian landscapes with comparable perennial monoculture but opposite positions on the urban–rural gradient were compared through a diachronic design: the peri-urban lowland of the Trevigiano (Veneto), inside the dispersed-city fabric of the Venice–Padua–Treviso region and under rapid Prosecco expansion, and the Langhe (Piedmont), a UNESCO-listed hill district of low settlement density whose agriculture is nonetheless fully industrialised around wine grapes, hazelnuts, and tourism. Interviews with 74 informants were conducted through complementary designs: a cohort-structured approach in the Trevigiano and actor-diversified and diachronic interviews in the Langhe, recorded 13 folk food taxa in the Trevigiano against 43 in the Langhe (Jaccard 0.19). The peri-urban repertoire is thin and mostly inert: recognition survives while practice does not, with gaps of up to 86 percentage points between the two, and only Humulus lupulus, anchored in ritual, dialect, and a commercial product, is transmitted intact. The non-peri-urban repertoire is broader and still mobile, relocated by younger foragers onto unmanaged refugia and partly professionalised. The proxy, however, has a precondition. WFP knowledge indexes a healthy agroecosystem only where the land is clean enough to gather from, and the Trevigiano is not: informants avoid treated margins. The one EU instrument that would have banned pesticides in public green areas was withdrawn in 2024. We conclude that peri-urban planning should treat edges, unmanaged interstitial land, and treatment transparency as food-system infrastructure, and propose paired habitat and knowledge indicators for peri-urban agroecological assessment. Full article

Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) are increasingly recognized as strategic tools for climate adaptation and urban regeneration, yet their implementation requires balancing environmental performance, territorial identity, and governance feasibility. This article investigates the application of the euPOLIS H2020 methodology in Palermo, Italy, focusing on the proposed transformation of Villa Turrisi—a residual peri-urban agricultural area representing one of the last remnants of the historical Conca d’Oro landscape—into a new public green infrastructure within the framework of the new Municipal Development Plan (PRG/PUG). This study examines how a structured co-design process involving municipal actors, citizens, and local associations can be coupled with ecosystem service assessments. Rather than selecting a single optimal design, the analysis evaluates two alternative vision scenarios—a multifunctional framework aligned with euPOLIS principles and an intensive urban forest model—to generate quantitative and qualitative baseline data. Environmental indicators (carbon sequestration, microclimatic regulation, and hydrological resilience) are used not as deterministic selection criteria but as theoretical decision-support evidence within a predominantly qualitative, value-driven local planning process. The core contribution of this work lies in demonstrating the operational transferability of the euPOLIS framework from front-runner to follower cities within a Mediterranean planning context. The Palermo case shows how quantitative environmental simulations can effectively inform—rather than dictate—participatory governance, heritage preservation, and regulatory feasibility. Ultimately, this article offers a transferable planning and policy framework that bridges European NBS research with municipal decision-making, providing actionable insights for integrating climate-resilient green infrastructure into local urban plans. Full article

Urban green spaces play an important role in supporting ecosystem functions, landscape connectivity, and urban resilience; however, their potential contribution may be constrained by fragmentation, inadequate maintenance, and limited integration among spatial planning instruments. This study develops a preliminary green infrastructure (GI) planning framework for the municipality of Noicattaro (Bari, Apulia, Italy) by integrating planning provisions with the observed condition and spatial distribution of existing public green spaces. A GIS-based spatial analysis, complemented by field surveys, assessed 89 public green spaces for compliance with planning requirements and maintenance status. The analysis also considered the spatial structure of the surrounding peri-urban landscape, including the karstic dry valleys (Lame), agricultural land uses, and relevant landscape and hydrogeological planning constraints. The results show that only 20.2% of the surveyed green spaces met both planning and maintenance criteria, whereas 78.4% fell into categories characterised by planning non-compliance, inadequate maintenance, or both. These findings highlight potential gaps between formal planning provisions and the observed condition and management of the municipal green system. The analysis of the Lame further revealed a predominance of agricultural land over natural vegetation, emphasising the importance of considering the wider agricultural and peri-urban landscape when identifying potential ecological connections. Based on the combined spatial and field assessment, a preliminary GI network framework was developed around core ecological areas, buffer zones, and strategically located green spaces, with the aim of identifying potential spatial connections and areas for further investigation. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of integrating planning analysis, GIS-based assessment, and field observations as a screening and decision-support approach for more context-sensitive GI planning in peri-urban Mediterranean landscapes. The proposed framework should be regarded as a preliminary planning proposal requiring further validation through biodiversity, ecosystem-service, accessibility, and implementation assessments. Full article

This study analyzes land use dynamics in Fălticeni Municipality over four decades (1985–2025), examining the influence of major political, socio-economic, and demographic changes on urban development. The transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, Romania’s democratic transformation and European integration, together with migration and population dynamics, have driven largely unregulated urban expansion at the expense of agricultural land and natural landscapes. Recent urban growth has also extended into areas with varying geomorphological vulnerability, increasing exposure to landslide hazards, while the city continues to face challenges related to abandoned industrial areas and insufficient forested land and green spaces. By integrating land use change analysis with physical vulnerability indicators, this study highlights the need for risk-informed and sustainable urban planning in medium-sized cities. It proposes a planning framework based on ecological zoning, controlled urban expansion on suitable terrain, brownfield redevelopment, the establishment of peri-urban forests, and the implementation of essential infrastructure supported by comprehensive geomorphological susceptibility assessments. The proposed approach provides practical guidance for enhancing urban resilience and can be replicated in other cities facing similar environmental and development challenges. Full article

Urban and peri-urban regions increasingly face climate-related pressures, competing land-use demands, and the need to expand renewable-energy infrastructure while maintaining agricultural land and landscape functions. Agrivoltaics, which combines photovoltaic energy generation with agricultural production, represents a potentially multifunctional approach to land use; however, regional GIS assessments often stop at environmental suitability surfaces without translating those results into planning-relevant cadastral inventories. This study develops and applies a planning-oriented Geographic Information System (GIS) framework for preliminary statewide agrivoltaic screening in Connecticut. Annual global solar radiation and terrain slope were integrated through a weighted suitability model, while incompatible land-cover classes were treated as hard exclusions through a binary land-cover mask. The workflow subsequently excluded protected and open-space lands, associated suitable areas with cadastral parcels, normalized and dissolved parcel identifiers using ParcelKey, and a recalculated suitable area from the resulting unique parcel geometries and then applied a minimum requirement of 1 ha of cumulative suitable area per retained parcel. The final baseline inventory contained 3497 normalized unique cadastral parcels encompassing 16,366.49 ha of GIS-identified suitable area, with suitable land representing an average of 42.46% of total parcel area. Peri-urban contexts accounted for the largest share of the final suitable area, containing 2497 parcels and 73.16% of the total, compared with 476 urban and 524 rural parcels. Sensitivity analysis indicated strong stability under alternative weighting schemes, with spatial overlap exceeding 99% relative to the baseline. Reducing the suitability-score threshold from 3.0 to 2.5 produced only minor changes, whereas increasing it to 3.5 reduced the inventory to 3095 parcels and 13,712.89 ha. From a sustainability perspective, the framework provides a spatial decision-support approach for coordinating renewable-energy planning with agricultural land stewardship, conservation constraints, and more efficient use of already fragmented land resources. By making the effects of exclusions, parcel thresholds, and analytical assumptions explicit, the approach supports more transparent and reproducible evaluation of land-use trade-offs relevant to sustainable development. The resulting inventory is intended as a first-stage planning resource rather than a determination of project feasibility or site-level sustainability performance. Full article

Accurate identification of the spatial distribution of agricultural greenhouses is essential for regional agricultural management in Japan. However, an efficient method for systematically mapping greenhouse locations onto existing farmland maps has not yet been established, and field surveys over large areas require substantial time and labor. This study aims to develop an automated approach for detecting agricultural greenhouses and integrating their locations into farmland maps by combining PlanetScope satellite imagery with farmland polygon data developed by the Japanese government. To improve the efficiency of the extraction process, farmland polygons were used to restrict the analysis to known agricultural areas, thereby reducing false detections originating from non-agricultural land. Within these predefined regions, three machine learning algorithms—Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Isolation Forest (ISF)—were applied to classify and extract greenhouse features from satellite imagery. After optimizing the hyperparameters of all models, RF and SVM achieved an equivalent peak performance, with an F1-score of 0.86, while ISF reached 0.72. RF was, however, markedly more robust to the polygon-level decision threshold, demonstrating a practical advantage in situations where the threshold cannot be optimized in advance. In addition, an ablation experiment confirmed that without pre-masking with farmland polygons, 81.9% of the pixels predicted as greenhouse were distributed outside the agricultural parcels. The proposed method is expected to serve as an effective approach for efficiently identifying the distribution of agricultural facilities and integrating them with existing farmland information in regions characterized by small and fragmented agricultural fields, such as Japan. Full article

Microplastics (MPs) and potentially toxic elements (PTEs) increasingly co-occur in agricultural and peri-urban soils, yet their combined effects on adsorption, mobility, bioavailability, and phytotoxicity are highly context-dependent. This review synthesizes plant–soil evidence by focusing on the interacting roles of MP polymer type, particle size and shape, aging/weathering state, soil geochemistry, dissolved organic matter, and rhizosphere processes. Across the reported studies, MP-PTE interactions show several major directions of changes: MPs may reduce PTE lability by promoting adsorption, aggregation, or sequestration within coated surfaces and soil aggregates; conversely, they may increase PTE mobility and plant exposure when reversible binding, dissolved organic ligands, pH shifts, or particle transport deliver labile PTEs to root-active zones. Dose-dependent and biphasic responses are also common, with low MP additions sometimes attenuating stress while higher doses intensify toxicity. Quantitatively, available crop studies show that intensified co-exposure can reduce plant biomass by approximately 10.2–29.3%, depending on crop species, plant organ, MP type, dose, and PTE identity, whereas antagonistic or neutral responses are also reported under other exposure conditions. The strongest evidence currently exists for Cd and As, but this review also considers Pb, Cu, Zn, Ni, Cr, and Hg to represent chemically distinct cationic, metalloid, and redox-sensitive PTEs. Overall, MPs should not be treated only as passive contaminant carriers; they act as dynamic reactivity modifiers that can function as sinks, vectors, or indirect regulators of PTE bioavailability depending on soil and rhizosphere boundary conditions. Full article

Riparian landscapes in peri-urban floodplains are important components of urban green infrastructure, but urbanization is eroding their capacity to support ecosystem services. This study examined the implications of riparian landscape change for ecosystem service capacity and developed spatially explicit recommendations to inform land use planning in Shanghai’s peri-urban fringe. A multi-scale landscape metric-based proxy assessment was applied to characterize changes in landscape composition and configuration at the regional and riparian buffer scales. From 2000 to 2020, the study area underwent pronounced land use change: the dominant land use type shifted from agricultural land (59.16%) to built-up land (67.69%), while 28% of water area and 57% of vegetated land were converted to other uses. Landscape metrics indicated a systemic shift toward fragmentation, characterized by higher patch density, smaller mean patch size, lower largest-patch and Contagion Indices, and simpler patch geometries. Changes within riparian buffers further indicated an overall decline in the potential capacity to provide provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services. By integrating landscape composition and configuration across spatial scales, the proposed framework links regional land use control with site-scale riparian design and provides an adaptable basis for sustaining ecosystem services in rapidly urbanizing floodplain and deltaic cities. Full article

Peri-urban rural public spaces are increasingly involved in territorial development, rural-regeneration management, and built-environment upgrading, yet existing research often treats rural regeneration as program implementation rather than as a spatial-development and public-space management problem. This study develops a built-environment governance framework from the 2025 Hsinchu City Community Rural Regeneration Facilitation Program in Taiwan. Using a reflective document-based case-study design, the analysis integrates administrative reports, training records, plan-review materials, spatial-planning documents, built-environment case evidence, agricultural net-zero policy materials, and Taiwanese rural-regeneration literature. Four descriptive readiness ratios are used to profile the governance process: SIE (urban–rural interface exposure), PPC (training participation), RAC (review conversion), and ATR (approval-track readiness). These indicators clarify administrative and governance readiness, but they are not treated as direct measurements of spatial quality, carbon reduction, or user wellbeing. The results identify a four-dimensional management framework for peri-urban rural public-space regeneration: wellbeing-oriented public spaces, low-carbon ecological infrastructure, cultural-landscape continuity, and community-based implementation capacity. The study further proposes standardized ordinal scoring rules, a policy-to-space translation model, and a future post-occupancy and spatial-quality validation scheme. The theoretical contribution lies in reframing rural regeneration as a built-environment governance interface for territorial development, while the practical contribution lies in providing a reviewable framework for managing public-space proposals, construction priorities, maintenance readiness, and future validation in peri-urban rural areas. Full article

Urban wetlands and agricultural lands are among the most important socio-ecological systems in urban areas. They support food production, biodiversity conservation, water regulation, climate resilience, and human well-being. However, rapid urbanization negatively affects wetland–agricultural coexistence (WAC) by destroying habitats, fragmenting landscapes, and intensifying land-use conflicts. Our study proposed a Wetland–Agriculture Coexistence Index (WACI) to assess the spatial pattern of WAC in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We considered four components for the WACI framework: wetland condition (WC), agricultural condition (AC), urban pressure (UP), and hydrological connectivity (HC). The WACI was developed using Landsat 8/9, Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) data, along with road network, population, and hydrological network data. Variables used in this study include land surface temperature (LST), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Modified Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI), Bare Soil Index (BSI), soil moisture, elevation, slope, population density, distance to roads, hydrological connectivity, and built-up %, which were normalized and integrated into four dimensions using an equal-weighted approach to develop the WACI. The results showed substantial spatial heterogeneity in WAC across Colombo. The average WACI was 0.51, indicating a moderate WAC. This study further identified that favorable environmental conditions, rich hydrological connectivity, and low urban pressure increased coexistence potentials. The spatial pattern of WACI identified priority areas for conservation, restoration, and sustainable urban planning implications in Colombo. Our WACI framework provides a practical and transferable method for assessing WAC in urban areas. The findings of this study support balanced urban wetland–agricultural management, conservation, food security, and long-term sustainability of rapidly urbanizing cities. Full article

Ethnobiological gardens conserve both biological and cultural diversity, but their permeable boundaries may expose native wildlife inside the garden to chronic domestic carnivore activity. In this single-garden case study, we compare small mammal assemblages between the Jardín Etnobiológico Tlaxcallan (JET), a periurban ethnobiological garden in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and its adjacent, heterogeneous Periphery of native vegetation and agricultural matrix, using live traps, camera traps, and direct observations over nine months. Across 162 detections of 9 species, the Periphery consistently showed higher richness and diversity than the JET at every Hill number order and the two assemblages were compositionally distinct (Bray–Curtis = 0.679), with the JET dominated by disturbance-tolerant species and the Periphery additionally harboring habitat-sensitive natives that were largely or entirely absent from the JET. Domestic cats were detected almost exclusively within the JET, while dogs were recorded at both sites. Dog and cat detection rates were both positively associated with species richness in generalized linear mixed models, a pattern that most plausibly reflects spatial co-occurrence between carnivores and disturbance-tolerant species within the JET rather than a facilitative effect of carnivores on richness. Because our design contrasts a single garden with a single Periphery, these results cannot separate the influence of domestic carnivores from co-varying differences in habitat structure, sampling geometry, or human activity. We therefore present the observed compositional turnover as a hypothesis-generating pattern consistent with—but not evidence of—carnivore-associated ecological filtering that warrants testing through replicated, multi-site designs before informing carnivore management in periurban ethnobiological gardens. Full article

Atmospheric ammonia (NH₃) is an important alkaline precursor of secondary inorganic aerosols, but its variability in livestock- and agriculture-influenced peri-urban environments remains poorly constrained. In this study, atmospheric NH₃ was measured at a peri-urban site in Chuncheon, South Korea and its variability was examined in relation to micro-meteorology, source direction, and surface–atmosphere exchange. Mean NH₃ concentrations were 200.8 ± 91.1 ppb during the April campaign, 83.0 ± 34.4 ppb during the May campaign, and 27.9 ± 16.2 ppb during the December campaign, indicating higher NH₃ levels during the April and May campaigns than during the December campaign. Campaign-specific correlation analyses showed that the relationships between NH₃ and micrometeorological variables differed among the observation periods, with robust associations observed in April and May but not in December. Moreover, the higher NH₃ concentration in the April campaign than in the May campaign, despite the lower mean temperature, indicates that the observed variability was not controlled by temperature alone. Conditional probability function analysis showed that elevated NH₃ concentrations in the April and May campaigns were mainly associated with southwesterly winds, suggesting the influence of nearby livestock and agricultural sources. The Penman–Monteith-derived latent heat flux further showed that daytime NH₃ enhancement coincided with evaporative surface-exchange conditions potentially favorable for volatilization, although it did not directly quantify manure-derived NH₃ emissions. In contrast, the December campaign showed lower NH₃ concentrations, weaker source-directional patterns, and limited latent heat flux influence, suggesting suppressed volatilization and intermittent local accumulation under stable conditions. These results indicate that the conditions associated with short-term NH₃ variability differed among the selected campaigns, reflecting complementary influences of source direction and campaign-specific micrometeorological and surface-exchange conditions, highlighting the need for concurrent gas- and particle-phase measurements to assess potential implications for PM_2.5 formation. Full article

Smart agriculture technologies are poised to transform farming, yet their adoption remains uneven even in well-resourced peri-urban settings. This study examines the factors shaping both adoption intention and actual use behavior among 206 suburban farmers across nine Shanghai districts via an extended UTAUT framework that incorporates hedonic motivation, trust, and perceived risk alongside the original constructs. To address a common but underexamined limitation in adoption research, both OLS path analysis and full Maximum Likelihood Structural Equation Modeling with latent variables were estimated and compared through systematic specification-sensitivity analysis. Three categories of findings emerged. Performance expectancy and perceived risk were robust predictors of behavioral intention across all model specifications, while facilitating conditions consistently dominated in terms of actual use behavior. By contrast, social influence and hedonic motivation proved unstable: their effects traded off across specifications because of high shared variance, indicating that these constructs may represent overlapping facets of a broader social–hedonic motivational factor rather than independent predictors. Most notably, the intention-to-behavior path weakened to non-significance in the latent variable model, revealing a substantial gap between farmers’ willingness and their actual adoption. This gap was bridged almost entirely by facilitating conditions, i.e., the availability of infrastructure, technical support, and implementation resources. Geographic analysis further revealed significant inter-district variation in trust, suggesting that local institutional context shapes technological confidence. Alternative mediation analysis showed that effort expectancy, trust, and hedonic motivation influenced intention indirectly through performance expectancy rather than acting as independent drivers. These findings suggest that promoting smart agriculture requires shifting policy emphasis from attitude change to developing the infrastructural and service conditions that enable willing farmers to adopt smart agricultural systems. Full article

Accelerated urbanisation and associated land-use conversion are reshaping the composition and functions of terrestrial ecosystems globally. In Southeast Asia, ecological change is increasingly mediated not only by demographic urbanisation but also by urban expansion, peri-urban development, and the conversion of agricultural, coastal, and forest land into built-up surfaces. This study integrates multi-source geographical information from 2014 to 2024 to examine 351 provincial-level units in 11 Southeast Asian nations. To describe the spatial-material dimension of urbanisation and ecological conditions, two indices were created: the Composite Nighttime Light Index (CNLI), used as a proxy for urban expansion and built-up development intensity, and the Improved Remote Sensing Ecological Index (IRSEI), which is tailored to tropical coastal locations. The development of human-environment interactions was measured using the Coupling Coordination Degree (CCD) model. Pathways of synergy and trade-off were found using an incremental four-quadrant framework, and nonlinear causes of spatial differentiation were investigated using Spearman correlation and the Optimal Parameter-based Geographical Detector (OPGD). Uncertainty was addressed through data-quality masking, annual compositing, consistent index-construction rules, and cautious interpretation of CCD and driver results as relative provincial-scale patterns. The regional mean CCD rose from 0.250 to 0.314 during the decade, showing a slow improvement; nevertheless, most places still have low to moderate levels of coordination. There is clear pathway divergence, with 38.7% of locations enduring trade-offs where built-up development happens at the price of ecological quality and 58.4% of regions seeing synergistic improvement. The coupling pattern is primarily driven by built-up area expansion, with multiple factors jointly producing strong nonlinear enhancement effects. Climate conditions and forest disturbance further strengthen these effects. This study extends beyond single-country analyses by situating remote-sensing coupling results within land-use transition, peri-urbanisation, urban–rural linkage, and regional-governance perspectives. It provides quantitative evidence to support differentiated policy strategies in rapidly urbanising places. Full article