The article presents the Lithuanian forest land change in the period of more than a hundred years. The causes leading to forest land use change are analysed in the article. The beginning of forestry in Lithuania can be traced back to Sigismund Augustus times starting from 1557, when Wallach reform was launched. However, over time forest land and its use evolved for a variety of political, social and economic factors. In 1795 the state-owned forests in Lithuania amounted to 35% of the total area of forests; other forests were owned by landlords, churches and kulak farms.

The article analyses the changes of agricultural production development and the demand of rural planning in the post-reform period. The main aim of the research is to identify the problems of land use and the formation of farms as the territorial-production structures in Lithuania as well as to analyse the possibilities of finding solutions to them. Tendencies of the decrease of the number of rural residents and farms were determined, the regulation of which is possible by improving working and living conditions in rural areas by means of public support measures.

Land degradation is a topical issue not only in Latvia, but also in Europe. Even the real estate additional tax rate of 1.5% does not prevent agricultural land from overgrowing, and there is no other legal mechanism to control it. One of the mechanisms of prevention of land degradation process is reconstruction of drainage systems, change of worthless agricultural land (less than 25 points) to forest land or improvement and return of agricultural land (more than 25 points) to economic production.

Large-scale agricultural land investments in Africa are often considered solely from the land perspective. Yet land, water and other natural resources are closely interlinked in agricultural production and in sustaining rural livelihoods. Such investments involving irrigation will potentially have implications for water availability and utilization by other users, making it imperative to regard water as an economic rather than a free good.

Land consolidation and land exchange are two important measures that can be used to improve the spatial structure of farm holdings. Unfortunately, land cannot be consolidated and exchanged in all villages of a given area simultaneously, due to economic, technical, and social considerations. Instead, an analysis has to be carried out, which allows one to rank the villages with regard to how urgently they need consolidation and exchange of land.

Soil quality is one of the most important factors determining the potential for obtaining a high profit from farming. The agricultural quality of soils is described by soil quality classes, and the suitability of soils for growing particular plants or plant communities is described in terms of soil-agricultural complexes. A unified soil classification has been developed for the entire area of Poland, which takes into account the morphological features and physical properties of Polish soils.

The spatial structure of rural areas in eastern Poland is characterized by large fragmentation of privately owned farmland, as well as the scattering of parcels across villages and beyond their boundaries. An important defect is also the unfavourable shape of land parcels, which hampers and sometimes even makes impossible rational management of land in a given area. Shape analysis has been the focus of numerous publications in fields such as geography and ecology, and, more recently, also geodesy.

The land consolidation project of the parts of Vilkaviškis district municipality, Pilviškiai and Klausučiai elderates, Alksnėnai and Sūdava cadastral area is analysed in the article, the main indicators of the project, the meaning of land consolidation, the need to improve the order of the execution and implementation of these activities are described in the article. The survey was carried out to examine the opinion of the participants of the project regarding the advantages of the proceeding and results of the project as well as some of its drawbacks.

The agricultural census of 2015 indicated that the total area of abandoned farming land reached to 424,090 ha which accounts for nearly 10% of total farming land in Japan. However, little is known about economic, social, and geographical characteristics that lead farmers to leave their farming lands idle. Tobit and quantile regression analysis are used to identify the underlying factors and the promising countermeasures using community level data in the Tohoku region of Japan.