Unabated urbanization has led to environmental degradation and subsequent biodiversity loss across the globe. As an outcome of unmitigated land use, multi-jurisdictional agencies have developed land use plans that attempt to protect threatened or endangered species across selected areas by which some trade-offs between harm to species and additional conservation approaches are allowed among the partnering organizations.

In the western Algerian steppe, the public authorities have carried out actions aimed at rural development (agricultural development programs) and combating desertification (grazing reserves) to counter the significant and rapid loss of vegetation cover of pastures by overgrazing, and the consequent impacts on local livelihoods. In the Rogassa area, these actions have impacted land tenure and the ancestral and collective way of land use and access. These changes have caused transformations in lifestyle and pasture management.

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes analysis is one of the most useful methodologies to understand how the land was used in the past years, what types of detections are to be expected in the future, as well as the driving forces and processes behind these changes. In Ethiopia, Africa, the rapid variations of LULC observed in the last decades are mainly due to population pressure, resettlement programs, climate change, and other human- and nature-induced driving forces.

The Loess Plateau of China suffers from severe erosion, which results in a great variety of economic and ecological problems. For scientific control of soil erosion, the key questions urgently to be addressed in this paper are: (1) Which are the driving factors under diverse geomorphological types? (2) Do these driving factors operate independently or by interacting? (3) Which zones under diverse geomorphological types suffer from severe erosion and need more attention?

The Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) approach uses flexible techniques under basic regulations, avoiding complicated systems and aiming to fulfill the objective of land tenure security for all. In addition, a land administration system should evolve, starting as a simple system in rural areas and gradually evolving into a more complex system in more populated areas where requirements and quality increase progressively. The system can develop to a precision system.

A Fit-for-Purpose (FFP) land administration system strives for a more flexible, inclusive, participatory, affordable, reliable, realistic, and scalable approach to land administration and management in developing countries. The FFP finds itself thus at the interface with the coordination and governance challenges of the mainstream promotion of democratic decentralization of the past decades in general, and collaborative systems for decentralized and participatory land governance in Africa, in particular.

Food production is the basis for ensuring human survival. Ecological compensation for arable land is important to ensure the sustainable use of arable land and food production. However, how is it possible to set the standard of ecological compensation and how to achieve it scientifically? In this paper, we take China as the study area and link the ecological compensation of arable land with the production, circulation and consumption of three staple foods. The amount of food is converted into the area of arable land needed to produce that food.

Land fragmentation (LF) is widespread worldwide and affects farmers’ decision-making and, thus, farm performance. We used detailed household survey data at the crop level from ten provinces in China to construct four LF indicators and six farm performance indicators. We ran a set of regression models using OLS methods to analyse the relationship between LF and farm performance.

A systematic approach to the establishment of the Franciscan Cadastre, which has been performed in most Central European countries, has resulted in the following documents: cadastral maps, cadastral municipality boundary demarcation records, lists of land parcels, lists of building parcels and lists of possessors. The documentation, which is stored in various archives, is digitized and made available to users through catalogs.

This Special Issue provides an insight, collated from 26 articles, focusing on various aspects of the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) concept and its application [...]

Special economic zones (SEZs) are important in Laos due to their ability to attract foreign investment, realize industrialization, and promote economic globalization. Based on Laos’ SEZs in operation, this study explored land-use intensity, structural evolution and land-use efficiency in Laos’ SEZs via the land-use dynamic degree, information entropy, super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) and gray relational analysis (GRA). The study determined that the total land-use area in Laos’ SEZs continuously increased from 2014 to 2020.

It is generally accepted that the perception of homeowners towards certain potential risks or amenities fades as distance from the risk or amenity increases. This study aims to illustrate the distance–decay pattern with an appropriate mathematical function. Distance–decay functions and parameters that yield the minimum residual sum of squares (RSS) for a given regression model are considered to be the optimal approximation for the pattern of decay.