The expansion of urban built-up areas is one of the most prominent characteristics of land use change in China. A growing body of literature has emphasized the triple spatial effects of the administrative hierarchy on urban built-up areas expansion, including heterogeneity, radiation, and segmentation. However, the existing studies have mainly focused on the administrative hierarchy at the prefectural level and above and have primarily concentrated on one single effect; few have integrated the triple effects as a whole.

Rapid urbanization has led to the increasing scarcity of land resources in China. Exploring the spatial-temporal characteristics and influencing factors of urban land use efficiency (LUE) is of great significance for optimizing the allocation efficiency of land resources and promoting regional sustainable development. In this study, the Super-SBM model was used to calculate the urban LUE of the Yellow River Basin from 2009 to 2018. The regional differences and agglomeration characteristics of LUE in the Yellow River Basin were analyzed.

Researchers increasingly investigate ecosystem services to assess their role in supporting livelihoods, well-being and economic value in order to inform decision-making. Many studies have explored links between ecosystem services and community-based livelihoods, with a very narrow focus on the importance of land use to well-being. We evaluated the value of ecosystem services from various land uses supporting livelihoods and the overall well-being of local communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh.

Kakamega National Forest Reserve is a tropical forest ecosystem at high risk of irreplaceable biodiversity loss due to persistent human-induced pressures. The aim of this paper is to assess the effect of fragmentation and forest cover loss on forest ecosystems in Kakamega National Forest Reserve, with the objectives: (1) to quantify the forest cover loss and analyse fragmentation in the Kakamega forest ecosystem and (2) to analyse the effect of forest cover loss on the spatial distribution of the Kakamega forest ecosystem at different timescales.

Forests are composed of landscape spatial units (patches) of different sizes, shapes, and characteristics. The forest landscape pattern and its trends are closely related to resistance to disturbance, restoration, stability, and the biodiversity of the forest landscape and directly influence the benefits and sustainable exploitation of forest landscape resources. Therefore, forest landscape patterns and the driving forces have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers.

Researchers increasingly investigate ecosystem services to assess their role in supporting livelihoods, well-being and economic value in order to inform decision-making. Many studies have explored links between ecosystem services and community-based livelihoods, with a very narrow focus on the importance of land use to well-being. We evaluated the value of ecosystem services from various land uses supporting livelihoods and the overall well-being of local communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh.

A landslide is a type of geological disaster that poses a threat to human lives and property. Landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) is a crucial tool for landslide prevention. This paper’s primary objective is to compare the performances of conventional shallow machine learning methods and deep learning methods in LSA based on imbalanced data to evaluate the applicability of the two types of LSA models when class-weighted strategies are applied.

To address the world’s ongoing environmental challenges, 193 countries have committed to 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) concerning the economy, society, and the environment. However, there are gaps in our understanding of forests and forestry support SDGs. Through a systematized review, we identified which SDGs are relevant to forests and forestry at the target level, along with their interactions (synergies or tradeoffs).

The Grain for Green Project (GGP) has influenced Shaanxi Province’s land-use pattern, resulting in a shift in ecosystem service value (ESV). Exploring the spatial and temporal evolution of the pattern of land use and ESV in Shaanxi Province, before and after the project’s implementation, can give a theoretical foundation for regional land-use planning.

Regardless of their biogeographic origins or degree of artificialization, the world’s forests are a source of a wide range of ecosystem services (ES). However, the quality and quantity of these services depend on the type of forest studied and its phytogeographic context. Our objective is to transpose the concept of ES, in particular, the assessment of forest ES, to the specific Mediterranean context of the North African mountains, where this issue is still in its infancy and where access to the data needed for assessment remains difficult.

Collective Forestland Tenure Reform has confirmed the forestland tenure of rural households and made forestland property rights clearer. In order to explain whether this policy is effective in improving rural households’ expected returns and sense of forestland tenure security, we built models to study the impact of off-farm employment on forestland input in the context of labor migration to urban areas.

Carbon storage (CS) is strongly associated with climate change and ecosystem services. Herein, taking Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China as the study object, analysis was performed upon the potential impacts of the urban–rural relationship of CS by combining the Integrated Assessment of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST) and the Patch Generation Land-use Simulation (PLUS) models. Based on three different development plans under regional policies, land-use/ land-cover (LULC) changes in Foshan City in 2035 were simulated.