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.

Landscapes have multiple functions relating to natural preservation and cultural inheritance, which are fundamental factors for tourist development. Particularly in villages, rural tourism is primarily based on the rural landscape. However, peri-urban villages face complex conflicts of urbanization and ruralism, in which landscapes are dynamic and need synergistic plans and management.

Sustainable management of soil carbon (C) at the state level requires valuation of soil C regulating ecosystem services (ES) and disservices (ED).

The fall of the Iron Curtain created a vacuum upon which large-scale collectivized agriculture was largely abandoned. Post-agricultural brownfields emerge in multiple manners across national, regional and local levels. While these sites remain rarely explored, we aimed to better understand the spatial consequences of the formation, persistence and reuse of these sites.

Most cases of multifunctional peri-urban agriculture offer diverse economic and ecological benefits, while a few involve cultural dimensions. In China, a “cultural turn” in the construction plan of beautiful villages has occurred.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) include all the landscape’s ecological components that have a function in the natural or urban ecosystem. Memorial Parking Trees (MPTs) are a new variant of a nature-based solution composed of a bioswale and a street tree allocated in the road, occupying a space that is sub-utilised by parked cars.

With the rapid economic growth and urbanisation process, a large amount of cultivated land has been permanently transformed into urban land. The protection of cultivated land has received widespread attention, and ecological compensation has been an effective means of restraining the decrease in cultivated land.

Agricultural development is facing two problems: insufficient grain production and low profit of farmers. There is a contradiction between the government’s goal of increasing production and the farmer’s goal of increasing profit.

The development of green agriculture is an effective way to realize the sustainable development of agriculture, which is of great significance for guaranteeing national food security, improving the supply ability of agricultural products, promoting the healthy development of cultivated land, and realizing green development.

This research was conducted on an area of inland sands characterised by various degrees of overgrowth by vegetation and soil stabilisation. This landscape’s origin is not natural but is connected to human industrial activities dating from early medieval times, which created a powerful centre for mining and metallurgy.