Rural-spatial restructuring involves the spatial mapping of the current rural development process. The transformation of land-use morphologies, directly or indirectly, affects the practice of rural restructuring. Analyzing this process in terms of the dominant morphology and recessive morphology is helpful for better grasping the overall picture of rural-spatial restructuring. Accordingly, this paper took Zhulin Town in Central China as a case study area. We propose a method for studying rural-spatial restructuring based on changes in the dominant and recessive morphologies of land use.

Two-thirds of rural Ghanaians are farmers, and farming is almost the only income source for Ghana’s forest-fringe communities. Some farmers adopt some agricultural practices to augment their operations while others do not. We examined the factors that influence farmers’ adoption and intensity of adoption of agricultural practices, namely, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, improved seeds, animal manure, and crop rotation.

Rural settlements account for 45% of the world’s population and are targeted places for poverty eradication. However, compared to urban footprints, the distribution of rural settlements is not well characterized in most existing land use and land cover maps because of their patchy and scattered organization and relative stability over time. In this study, we proposed a pixel- and object-based method to map rural settlements by employing spectral-texture-temporal information from Landsat and Sentinel time series.