Urban–rural integration (URI) has emerged as a crucial strategy to bridge urban and rural disparities and promote more sustained urbanisation paradigms in China and abroad. The urban–rural interface, where urban and rural spaces and daily...
Alternative food networks (AFNs) represent local food systems and short supply chain networks alternative to global food systems. These networks are often developed within rural–urban interfaces and take various forms, due to the high propensit...
Strengthening urban–rural linkages (URLs) has been proposed by UN-Habitat within the framework of ‘Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ to narrow down urban–rural differences via shaping new urban–rural relationships. L...
This study offers, by an empirical analysis, another perspective on post-socialist development, highlighting the role of the urban–rural interface in regional dynamics. The current literature on the relationships between both issues is not too...
Among all livestock systems in tropical regions, the dairy sector is facing huge challenges to sustain productivity under the rapidly changing climatic conditions. To date, there is a lack of knowledge on the combined effects of climate, season, and...
Climate change and human interventions can boost wildfires. Although naturally happening, massive events are becoming more frequent and severe. In Portugal’s mainland, many rural settlements are populated mainly by older people, and uninhabited...
Forest fires are considered by Portuguese civil protection as one of the most serious natural disasters due to their frequency and extent. To address the problem, the Fire Forest Defense System establishes the implementation of fuel management bands...
Urban–rural interfaces represent complex systems that require complex solutions for sustainable development and resilience against pollution, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss and impaired flux of ecosystem services (ES). Green infrastru...
Today, planning an urban–rural interface requires redefining the planner’s role and toolbox. Global challenges such as food security, climate change and population growth have become urgent issues to be addressed, especially for the implications in l...
Urbanisation is a global trend rapidly transforming the biophysical and socioeconomic structures of metropolitan areas. To better understand (and perhaps control) these processes, more interdisciplinary research must be dedicated to the rural–urban i...
The rural-urban (peri-urban) interface zones are important places that generate demands for ecosystem goods and services (EG & S). Urban regions face transitions in land use that affect ecosystem services (EG & S) and thus human wellbeing. Es...
Human diets and their associated environmental impacts differ across segments of the population. There is evidence that consumer choices of food intake can also affect the overall environmental impacts of a food system. This paper analyzes the enviro...
The elaboration of City Development Strategies (CDS) helps cities to harness the potential of urbanization through strategic planning, and consequently to contribute to promoting development, balancing city growth, and empowering citizens. Continuous...
This Special Issue re-explores research topics related to the relationships between urban and rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic period in 2020 and beyond [...]
Land consolidation (LC) plays an important role in disturbing carbon storage (CS) change. Evaluating how LC affects CS is crucial for mitigating global climate change. However, existing research often overlooks differences in various aspects of land...
Areas where humans and anthropogenic structures encounter or mix with vegetation are called wildland–urban interfaces. These areas present high fire risk; on the one hand, the presence of humans can contribute to the start of forest fires and,...
In recent years, news about accidents, including fatalities, on the highways of Paraná caused by low visibility due to fires occurring along the roads have been recurrent. In this sense, the objective of this study was to relate the highway ar...
The territories between urban and rural areas, also called urban–rural fringe, commonly present inherent instability and notable heterogeneity. However, investigating the multifaceted urban–rural fringe phenomenon based on large-scale identification...
Urban-rural imbalance impedes sustainable development in modernizing nations. This paper examines China’s urban-rural relations via symbiosis theory, building a model and index system to assess urban-rural symbiosis, contributing to SDG 11 (Sus...
Due to a lack of the realization mechanism and operational pattern of the urban-rural integration by land use, this study employs land use to regulate interface elements to achieve urban-rural integration development. Therefore, we analyzed urban-rur...
27 November 2021
Food, energy, and water (collectively referred to as ‘FEW’) security forms the key to human survival as well as socioeconomic development. However, the security of these basic resources is increasingly threatened due to growing demand. Be...
Urbanization has significantly impacted ecological connectivity, making the optimization of ecological networks (ENs) crucial. However, many existing strategies focus on overall network structure and overlook the spatial concentration of local ecolog...
Globally, the agricultural landscape is the most exposed due to urbanisation. Therefore, finding the spatial and temporal patterns of changes in agricultural landscapes is essential for sustainable development. This study developed a workflow to addr...
Rural resilience building has gained increasing scholarly attention, yet existing literature overlooks the temporal dynamics of resilience evolution and lacks an integrative framework to explain cross-level mechanisms. This paper uses a longitudinal...
Although urbanization has contributed to improving living conditions, it has had negative impacts on the natural environment in urbanized areas. Urbanization has changed the urban landscape and resulted in increasing land surface temperature (LST). T...
Peri-urban interfaces tend to ensure water supply relying on their surrounding’ resources, generating water disputes when asking for collaboration. The urban-rural matrix of the Marina Baja county in southern Spain is characterized by inland ir...
Like many places around the world, the wildland–urban interface areas surrounding urban regions are subject to variable levels of fire risk, threatening the natural habitats they contact. This risk has been assessed by various authors using man...
Since the 21st century, large cities around the world have experienced the transition from economically destructive development to a harmonious eco-environment. Understanding the dynamic relationships between human activities and urban eco-environmen...
Metropolitan areas worldwide have grown rapidly and are usually surrounded by peri-urban zones that are neither urban nor rural. Despite widespread use of the term ‘peri-urban’, physical determination of these spaces is difficult due to t...
Periurban areas of growing cities in developing countries have been conceptualised as highly dynamic landscapes characterised by a mixture of socioeconomic structures, land uses and functions. While the body of conceptual literature on periurban area...
11 August 2022
In 2017, Portugal lived through its most infamous extreme wildfire season with 117 fatalities, hundreds of injured people, 3588 destroyed structures, an official cost of 1456 million euros, and 539,920 ha of burned area. Among the legislative and ins...
In Italy, large-scale changes in the structure of land use can be observed. These are caused primarily by socio-economic pressures, generally determining the conversion of agricultural land into artificial surfaces. Our aim was to investigate if and...
Educational achievement plays a significant role in the labour market, benefiting individuals and society. Graduating from high school is a key step towards better employment opportunities and a prerequisite for higher education attainment. In 2023,...
We conducted a study on water management at the Boise River Watershed in a changing global environment potentially induced by climate variability and urbanization. Environmental ‘hotspots’ associated with water quality and quantity were f...
In recent years, awareness has grown of the vital importance of ecological systems, provoking increased research into how to improve their resilience. Here, one popular new technical/management solution is the creation of greenways along riversides....
Amid China’s push for new urbanization and refined urban governance, urban villages function as key transitional spaces in the process of rural–urban spatial restructuring. Their internal differentiation and typological governance approac...
To better promote the new anti-poverty strategy and serve as a reference for poverty alleviation in other developing countries and regions, this paper discussed the impact of the anti-poverty relocation and settlement program (ARSP) on the livelihood...
Studying land use transition and restructuring has value for promoting sustainable regional development, especially in China’s vast rural areas, which are undergoing rapid changes. Current research tends to focus on the macro level, and analyse...
The Grand Canal possesses a unique ecosystem as one of the world cultural heritage sites. However, its ecological roles and services have been underemphasized in heritage conservation efforts, leading to environmental pollution and the degradation of...
Mediterranean regions are likely to be the most vulnerable areas to wildfires in Europe. In this context, land-use change has promoted land abandonment and the consequent accumulation of biomass (fuel) in (progressively less managed) forests and (non...
Land use changes often lead to soil erosion, land degradation, and environmental deterioration. However, little is known about just how much humans accelerate erosion compared to natural background rates in non-agricultural settings, despite its impo...
Analysis of urban distribution and its expansion using remote sensing data has received increasing attention in the past three decades, but little research has examined spatial patterns of urban distribution and expansion with buffer zones in differe...
Inherited and current trends of urbanization result in growing agri–urban mixed land use patterns that strongly call for innovative management and planning tools at the urban/rural interface. This could especially help to cope with both resilie...
Upgrading the industrial structure is an essential step for economic growth and the transformation of old and new development drivers. Counties situated at the rural–urban interface hold a comparative advantage in industrial upgrading compared...
This research proposes a hierarchical adaptive approach to urban renewal that seeks to reconcile heritage preservation with contemporary functional demands in historic urban environments. Focusing on cultural and sports public facilities in the north...
The research features how parallel computing can advance hydrological performances associated with different calibration schemes (SCOs). The result shows that parallel computing can save up to 90% execution time, while achieving 81% simulation improv...
Farmers utilize pesticides extensively on their farms to control weeds and insects, as well as increase crop productivity. Despite these advantages, their excessive use poses a serious threat, particularly to the population living at the nexus of urb...
The model simulation focuses on an extreme rainfall event that triggered a flood hazard in the Lake Victoria basin region of East Africa from June 24th to 26th, 2022. This study investigates the impacts of its urban canopy on the extreme rainfall eve...
Coupled with rapid urbanization and urban expansion, the spatial relationship between transportation development and land use has gained growing interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper, a complex network model and land use intensi...
Using Shanghai as a case study, this paper develops a multi-source fusion and interpretable machine learning framework. Sentiment indices were extracted from Weibo check-ins with ERNIE 3.0, street-view elements were identified using Mask2Former, and...
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