Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution.

Smallholder agriculture is a major source of income and food for developing nations. With more frequent drought and increasing scarcity of arable land, more accurate land-use planning tools are needed to allocate land resources to support regional agricultural activity. To address this need, we created Land Capability Classification (LCC) system maps using data from two digital soil maps, which were compared with measurements from 1305 field sites in the Dosso region of Niger. Based on these, we developed 250 m gridded maps of LCC values across the region.

To understand the urbanization process, it is essential to detect urban spatial growth and to study relations with social development. In this study, we take Wuhan as a case to examine urban land growth patterns and how social factors relate to the urban land evolution between 1990, 2000, and 2010. We first classify land cover using Landsat images and examine the urban growth patterns during various stages based on landscape metrics regarding the area, density, and shape. Afterwards, principal component analysis and census data are used to extract key social factors.