【Author】Michael E. Meadows is Professor in the School of Geography and Ocean Sciences at Nanjing University, China, and Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests lie broadly in the field of physical geography, especially human impact on the environment, including land degradation and desertification. He is President of the International Geographical Union 2020-2024.

Prof. Yansui Liu, Prof. Guy M Robinson and Associate Prof. Yongsheng Wang, Yuheng Li are organizing a special issue on Sustainable Land Use and Rural Revitalization against Global Challenges in Land Use Policy. The goals of this Specific Issue are to clarify the frontier issues of global change and land use, reveal the interaction between human and natural factors affecting land use, and further explore the main direction of deepening research of land use policy and rural areal system transformation in nations and key regions.

Yansui, Liu, Weilun, Feng, Yuheng, Li. (2023). Innovative Development of Modern Agricultural Geographic Engineering. In: Bański, J., Meadows, M. (eds) Research Directions, Challenges and Achievements of Modern Geography. Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6604-2_5

Dr. Alexey Naumov has organized a special issue on Emerging challenges for rural development in the Russian Journal of Economics. The special issue is published in December of 2023.

The systematic decline of rural areas in the process of rapid urbanization has become a global trend, creating greater challenges for sustainable rural development. As the spatial projection of socio-economic development and living environment in rural areas, the continuous tracking of rural settlements (RUS) is crucial to quantify the imbalance of rural development. However, consistent information on RUS is highly needed but is quite deficient in current research. In this study, a cost-effective mapping model was proposed to produce an annual RUS dataset in the rapid urbanization region of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) in North China during 1990–2020, and the temporal-spatial regularity of RUS changes was further analyzed.

Prof. Guy M. Robinson has organized a special issue on Global Sustainable Agriculture and Land Management Systems in Geography and Sustainability. The special issue aims to stimulate debate on sustainable agriculture and the various land management systems contributing to sustainable agri-food systems. The Special Issue based on papers presented to the AGLE sessions at the Paris IGU now has six published papers. There are a further two papers being revised and another one under review.

Intended as a comprehensive guide to the study of land use and rural development, this book offers detailed descriptions of land use transitions and rural restructuring. To do so, it chiefly focuses on three main aspects, the first of which is the application of geographical perspectives in order to understand rural issues in connection with urbanization, industrialization, globalization and rural vitalization strategies in contemporary China. Secondly, it presents a rich blend of regional and national analyses; detailed explorations of local cases; and critical and theoretically informed discussions that address historical paths and future projections. Lastly, it adapts concepts derived from western literature to situations and experiences in rural China, and provides empirical evidence from an “insider” perspective. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers, and for graduate students / courses in geography and sociology.

This book attempts to introduce the theory of system science and engineering technology into the geographic research of urban-rural transformation, reveals the level-structure-function of urban-rural transformation, and promotes the scientific research on urban-rural transformation. Focusing on the systematic diagnosis of new-type urbanization, urban-rural land use, industrial structure transformation and public facilities allocation, this book explores the long-term mechanism, innovative model, and scientific way of urban-rural land optimal allocation and spatial reconstruction and develops urban-rural transformation geography.

The IGU-AGLE executive members Yansui Liu and Yuheng Li organized a special issue at Land Use Policy with the theme of "Land use and rural sustainability in China". 2018 May, Volume 74: 1-308, ISSN 0264-8377. This special issue is produced for the International Conference on Land Use and Rural Sustainability, 17-20 August, Xi'an, China

The latest issue of Nature argues that a rural revival is needed globally to counter urbanization. The paper is co-authored by Professor Yansui Liu and Associate Professor Yuheng Li of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professors Liu and Li are respectively chair and secretary of the recently established IGU Commission on Agricultural Geography and Land Engineering (AGLE). They argue that,while urbanization gets a lot of attention globally as cities grow, most particularly in Asia and Africa, the rural decline that has accompanied this seems to have gone largely unnoticed.

In 2016, the journal published a special issue on Rural Restructuring in China in Volume 47, Part B. The issue was published by the journal's editor-in-chief, Aberystwyth, UK. Under the guidance of the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Michael Woods of Aberystwyth University, UK, the special issue was edited by Researcher Long Hualou and Researcher Liu Yanshi as Guest Editors-in-Chief, and published a total of 25 academic papers related to Rural Restructuring in China in 2016, with a total of 80 authors and their team members from renowned scholars and their teams in the field of Rural Development in five countries, namely, China, the United States, Sweden, Australia, and Germany. More than 80 authors.