The purpose of this study is to develop a new remote sensing method to assess the area of cultivated land illegally converted to nurseries and orchards in the Yangtze River Delta region of China over the past 40 years (1980–2020), and then estimate the increase in grain yield based on this area. Our result showed that 2.23 × 104 km2 of cultivated land was reduced by 11.8% over the past 40 years. About 14,521.40 km2 of cultivated land was converted to nursery and orchard from 1980 to 2020. The conversion area was unevenly distributed among different administrative regions.

Land use, land resource demands, and landscape management practices are linked to many of the environmental, climatic, and socio-economic challenges faced by contemporary society. The study focuses on a comparative analysis of the experience of the land resource management (LRM); thus, the study aims respond to how the land-related resources are managed, what policy instruments support it, and what improvements would promote the sustainable management of these resources.

Increasing flood damage has led to a rising importance of land use in flood risk management policies, commonly referred to as the spatial turn in flood risk management. This includes policies aiming at making space for rivers, which, in practice, lead to an increasing demand for land. Although research has been conducted on the variety of policies, the resulting land use conflicts in flood-prone areas have not been paid much attention to. This paper therefore analyses the current land use and its changes in Alpine flood-prone areas in Austria.