Mediterranean land systems are amongst the most susceptible to global change, in part due to the region’s vulnerability to climate change and misfit within a high production demanding political and societal setting. The impact of global drivers at a local scale (i.e., the possible trajectories of change of a territory) are context-dependent, and to some extent dependent on how local actors perceive them and act upon them.

This opinion paper discusses urban lawns, the most common part of open green spaces and urban green infrastructures. It highlights both the ecosystem services and also disservices provided by urban lawns based on the authors’ experience of working within interdisciplinary research projects on lawns in different cities of Europe (Germany, Sweden and Russia), New Zealand (Christchurch), USA (Syracuse, NY) and Australia (Perth).

This paper presents the results from a quality and usability analysis of participatory land registration (PaLaR) in Indonesia’s rural areas, focusing on data quality, cost, and time. PaLaR was designed as a systematic community-centered land titling project collecting requisite spatial and legal data. PaLaR was piloted in two communities situated in Tanggamus and Grobogan districts in Indonesia. The research compared spatial data accuracy between two approaches, PaLaR and the normal systematic land registration approach (PTSL) with respect to point accuracy and polygon area.