cultivated land protection policies, operation logic, current dilemmas, grounded theory, land use, ecological service value, spatial-temporal evolution, spatial agglomeration, Southeast Tibet, land use change, habitats quality, counterfactual analysis, China, urban green development efficiency, Yangtze River Delta, three-stage DEA analysis, carbon emissions, intermediary effect model, panel threshold model, Pleiades satellite image, landscape pattern, cultural landscapes, landscape function, urban ecosystem, landscape ecology, PM10 concentration, cultivated land green utilization efficiency, digital financial inclusion, cultivated land transfer, integrated urban–rural development, efficiency, spatiotemporal evolution, urban agglomerations, land degradation, bundle of rights, security of tenure, SLM, investment, Ethiopia, poverty assessment, water conservancy project, resettlement, land use management, landslide displacement prediction, complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise, bidirectional long short-term memory, land transfer, energy consumption, agricultural technology’s progress, Technology: general issues

With the rapid development of urbanization and social economy, the utilization and protection of land have become one of the great social problems globally. Unreasonable land-use planning and allocation are gradually reducing the efficiency and sustainability of urban land use, and also branching out the conversion scale of farmland to construction land. Farmland reduction and urbanization not only give rise to ecological environmental issues, such as land degradation, environmental pollution, carbon emission increases, and so on, but also induce many social problems around land interests. We hope that if sustainable development and a harmonious human–land relationship can be integrated into the land-use planning and management processes, it will be possible to fulfill the diversified requirements of urbanization and minimize adverse ecological and social impacts at the same time.This Special Issue gathers together studies regarding sustainable land use and management from different research perspectives, aiming to contribute to the global challenges of sustainable urban and rural development in a rapidly urbanizing world.