Urban Open Space Conservation: Advances, Perspectives and Contribution in Enhancing Urban Sustainability
A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Forestry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 June 2022) | Viewed by 2881
Special Issue Editors
Interests: land use change; ecosystem services; land use planning; forest management
Interests: urban forest; landscape ecology; landscape planning; land management; forest management; environmental science
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: forestry; wood technology; forest utilization; sustainable forest management; remote sensing; LiDAR
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
There is a rising interest in enhancing sustainability in urban and peri-urban contexts through implementing Nature-Based solutions able to increase ecosystem services provisioning and human wellbeing. Accordingly, the availability of open spaces and vacant lands in urban and peri-urban areas represents a challenging planning issue with particular regard to their multifunctionality. Even being currently often neglected by conservation and valorisation programs and investments, these spaces can play a crucial role in i) hampering further land take in urban areas, ii) increasing urban sustainability through enhancing their ecological and functional role, iii) increasing the liveability and wellbeing of inhabitants, iv) balancing possible environmental and social inequality issues within cities. Despite their potential social and ecological role, there is still a limited knowledge in monitoring trends in the availability, characteristics, and functions of open spaces in urban areas as well as on interventions and measures towards their protection, restoration, enhancement, and better inclusion into urban planning. This Special Issue of Forests is intended as a multidisciplinary opportunity to describe innovative approaches for monitoring the past, current and future trends in urban open spaces and to propose planning instruments and interventions able to emphasize their socio-ecological role in strengthening urban green infrastructures. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the development of advanced quantitative and qualitative methods to monitor the abundance, characteristics (e.g., biophysical, management, functional) and trends over time of urban open areas, even related to different urbanization, planning and socio-economic patterns. Case studies on future possible trends of urban open areas under different planning scenarios are also welcome as well as those dealing with innovative approaches for modelling their contributions in terms of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services provisioning, and ways to strengthen their inclusion into decision-making processes. Manuscripts can cover a wide range of spatial (e.g., from municipality to regional and national) and implications (e.g., planning, governance, policy) scales.
Dr. Lorenzo Sallustio
Prof. Marco Marchetti
Prof. Dr. Bruno Lasserre
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- urban area
- urban forest
- green infrastructure
- vacant land
- ecosystem services
- urban planning
- land cover change
- land change monitoring
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