This article presents an analysis of the complexities implied by the implementation of the Colombian land restitution policy, as an example of the way in which the state works in its day-to-day practice. The document highlights the role played by the bureaucracy of “land” in the management of the so-called post-conflict setting. It is constructive in showing the multiscale nature of the state, whose operation cannot be understood outside the various levels and scales that compose it.

This paper focuses on a three-year rural landscape strategy-making process, which was driven by a Danish municipality and involved a large number of stakeholders. The project was part of an action research program aimed at developing new approaches to collaborative landscape planning. Gaining experiences with such approaches was part of this aim. During the course of the project, the focus and scale of the strategy changed significantly. The process developed in interesting ways in respect to three dimensions of collaborative landscape planning: collaboration, scale, and public goods.

The urban heat island (UHI) effect has become a significant focus of research in today’s era of climate change, and a key consideration for the next generation of urban planning focused on green and livable cities. UHI has traditionally been measured using in situ data and ground-based measurements. However, with the increased availability of satellite-based thermal observations of the Earth, remotely sensed observations are increasingly being utilized to estimate surface urban heat island (SUHI), using land surface temperature (LST) as a critical indicator, due to its spatial coverage.

The Mediterranean Basin is at the same time a region of stark social and ecological contrasts and a global biodiversity hotspot, where complex local evolving land use and land cover patterns compose the region’s landscapes. In this context, we aimed for a specific case study of the southeast of France, to assess land and farming systems’ dynamics, to identify their underlying drivers, and to propose possible shared future scenarios for local policies’ implementation. We based our analyses on a mixed approach and operated at downscale from territorial to local scale.

Spatially explicit assessments of ecosystem services (ES) potentials are a key component in supporting a sustainable land use management. The ES matrix method is a commonly used approach as it allows for a comparably fast, comprehensible and accessible ES assessment. As it is often based on land use/land cover data (LULC) with no spatial variability, a main critique is that the results fail to assess spatial variability at landscape levels, which limits the reliability of the outputs for spatial planning applications.

Although the way in which vegetation phenology mediates the feedback of vegetation to climate systems is now well understood, the magnitude of these changes is still unknown. A thorough understanding of how the recent shift in phenology may impact on, for example, land surface temperature (LST) is important. To address this knowledge gap, it is important to quantify these impacts and identify patterns from the global to the regional scale.

The understanding of relationships between ecosystem services and the appropriate spatial scales for their analysis and characterization represent opportunities for sustainable land management. Bundles have appeared as an integrated method to assess and visualize consistent associations among multiple ecosystem services. Most of the bundle assessments focused on a static framework at a specific spatial scale.

Traditional villages are important carriers of traditional cultural heritage, and they have strong historical, cultural, aesthetic and tourism value for all countries and the international community. In China, the number of traditional villages is currently decreasing each year, and the precious material and non-material heritage is at risk of disappearing in the process of urbanization.

Conservation agriculture may lead to increased penetration resistance due to soil compaction. To loosen the topsoil and lower the compaction, one-time inversion tillage (OTIT) is a measure frequently used in conservation agriculture. However, the duration of the positive effects of this measure on penetration resistance is sparsely known. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the spatio-temporal behavior of penetration resistance after OTIT as an indicator for soil compaction.

The rain gardens at Bryggen in Bergen, Western Norway, is designed to collect, retain, and infiltrate surface rainfall runoff water, recharge the groundwater, and replenish soil moisture. The hydraulic infiltration capacity of the Sustainable Drainage System (SuDS), here rain gardens, has been tested with small-scale and full-scale infiltration tests. Results show that infiltration capacity meets the requirement and is more than sufficient for infiltration in a cold climate.

Many countries grapple with the intractable problem of formalizing tenure security. The concept of ‘fit-for-purpose land administration’ (FFPLA) offers a way forward by advocating a shift towards a more flexible, pragmatic and inclusive approach for land rights recording. Inherently, the process and outcome of implementing FFPLA will have significant socio-political ramifications but these have not received much attention in the literature; additionally, few papers have considered this in the context of decentralization, an endorsed strategy for implementing FFPLA.

Forest carbon sequestration offset protocols have been employed for more than 20 years with limited success in slowing deforestation and increasing forest carbon trading volume. Direct measurement of forest carbon flux improves quantification for trading but has not been applied to forest carbon research projects with more than 600 site installations worldwide.