In this paper we examine the question of whether and how municipal landscape plans exert a positive influence on and/or correlate with selected aspects of the landscape. To this end, a representative sample of municipal landscape plans in Germany and a statistical-quantitative evaluation approach are used to uncover correlations between planning and landscape development. As a result, we can show that municipalities which draw up a landscape plan have a higher proportion of natural areas and a lower hemeroby index, i.e. a lower level of human influence.

The Brazilian Amazon has 49.8 million hectares (Mha) of public forestlands not allocated by the federal or state governments to a specific tenure status: the so called undesignated public forests (UPF). Historically, these public forests have been vulnerable to land grabbers and land speculation. Here, we highlighted the imminent threat in UPF by quantifying their accumulated deforestation, all of which is illegal, for the period 1997–2018 and the potential illegal occupation.

The design of efficient Green Infrastructure —GI— systems is a key issue to achieve sustainable development city planning goals in the twenty-first century. This study’s main contribution is the identification of potential GI elements to better align the environmental, social and economic perspectives in the GI design by including information about the use, activities, preferences and presence of people. To achieve this, user generated content from Location Based Social Network —LBSN— Foursquare is used as a complementary data source.