The development and use of underground space is a necessity for most cities in response to rapid urbanisation. Effective underground land administration is critical for sustainable urban development. From a land administration perspective, the ownership extent of underground assets is essential for planning and managing underground areas. In some jurisdictions, physical structures (e.g., walls, ceilings, and utilities) are also necessary to delineate the ownership extent of underground assets.

After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all.

This Special Issue provides an insight, collated from 26 articles, focusing on various aspects of the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) concept and its application [...]

Intensive land use can support sustainable socioeconomic development, especially in the context of limited land resources and high population. It is measured by land-use intensity that reflects the degree of land-use efficiency. In order to support decision-making for efficient land use, we investigated the mechanism whereby natural and socioeconomic factors influence land-use intensity from the perspectives of overall, region-, and city-based analysis, respectively.

Land administration is established to manage the people-to-land relationship. However, it is believed that 70% of the land in developing countries is unregistered. In the case of Ecuador, the government has an ambitious strategy to implement a national cadaster on the full territory in a short time period. Therefore, the objective of this study was the assessment of land administration in Ecuador based on the fit-for-purpose approach as an assessment framework.

Natural resource management has entered a new stage in 2018 in the People’s Republic of China (China) marked by the establishment of the Ministry of Natural Resources of China (MNRPRC). More functions and responsibilities are integrated in the MNRPRC to build a uniform management system for full natural resource features in China with the aim of implementing uniform spatial planning and regulation, management, use and control, surveying, and registration for full natural resources.

Land consolidation zoning is the basis of land reclamation planning and provides a precondition for land management work. Zoning is beneficial to scientific decision-making regarding the use of cultivated land resources, and helps to ensure the quality and production level of cultivated land. Hence, land consolidation zoning is of national significance in terms of safeguarding food security.

The redevelopment of urban villages is a prominent part of urban renewal in China, which has attracted much attention from the academic community. However, the understanding of when and where the redevelopment of urban villages occurs is still limited partly because of the lack of empirical analysis. Through exploratory spatial data and overlay analyses, this study examines the spatio-temporal distribution characteristics based on data from 277 urban village redevelopment projects in Shenzhen, China, between 2010 and 2018.

Water reclamation contributes to a guaranteed increase in the yield of agricultural lands and can also negatively affect the quality of the land. Technical malfunction of reclamation systems, outdated reclamation technologies, poor water quality, and untimely drainage may result in such negative processes as resalting and bogging. In Russia, state monitoring of reclaimed lands is carried out annually and obtained data are used to identify soil degradation and pollution to fix the problems at the appropriate times.

In Slovakia, the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in combination with land concentration represents a legitimate threat that can lead to land grabbing. Based on the research, two interrelated areas of protection need to be effectively regulated to limit land grabbing: the protection of access to land and the protection of agricultural land.

Land administration systems differ by their types and practices. The data dissemination practices are considered to be outdated, as in most cases the digitisation of land administration data was conducted to match the paper-based system. This paper reviews four different land administration data dissemination practices through four case studies, where each selected jurisdiction represents one land administration system type. The analysed LAS data dissemination practices were conducted for Croatia, England, New Zealand and Green County, OH, USA.

Land fragmentation (LF) is widespread worldwide and affects farmers’ decision-making and, thus, farm performance. We used detailed household survey data at the crop level from ten provinces in China to construct four LF indicators and six farm performance indicators. We ran a set of regression models using OLS methods to analyse the relationship between LF and farm performance.