Dear Colleagues,

The dominant socioeconomic factors inducing landscape dynamics in rural regions worldwide produce feedbacks originating from vortexes of environmental and ecological changes, which ultimately impact their associated services. Regional socioecological studies and functional biodiversity monitoring have become central in landscape ecology and environmental management, namely for planning and implementing political measures aimed at creating sustainable and adaptable future landscapes. In fact, ongoing climate, land use and land cover changes, and the aforementioned socioeconomic activities, have profound interweaves, shaping regimes in manmade landscapes that are highly dependent on population density, crops’ economic value, political decisions, and other socioecological factors. Shifts and effects associated with these highly dynamic landscapes are only partially understood, namely the main cause–effect relationships between changes in the landscape and ecosystem responses. Moreover, the recognition by an increasing number of scientists and stakeholders of the explanatory and predictive limitations of the traditional measures of biodiversity and ecosystem value and landscape management has triggered a revolution in the way we consider biodiversity and ecosystem services. Even though enhancing and/or maintaining biodiversity and the ecosystem services can be the basis for adapting landscapes to global and regional changes, as well as to the design of risk-decreasing strategies, the resilience of socioecological systems has become the core investigation. With time lags characterizing socioecological systems and nonlinear features and the difficult-to-reverse nature of regime shifts interceded by tipping points, the importance of the concept and application of resilience of ecosystems and landscapes has been brought to light. In fact, societal and ecological mechanisms usually interact, generating changes in biological communities, degradation of ecosystems, and effects on landscapes and human wellbeing in a much more imperceptible and misunderstood way. The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together cutting-edge investigation on the problematics of managing landscapes on our fast-moving planet, with a special focus on the application of new and disruptive investigations supported by socioecology, functional biodiversity, and resilience concepts.

Prof. Dr. Mário Santos
Prof. Dr. António Luis Crespí
Prof. Dr. Reinaldo Lucas Cajaiba
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. Land 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.

• Climate change
• Production landscapes
• Functional ecology
• Resilience
• Biodiversity
• Management
• Functional redundancy
• Ecological modeling