Lake Urmia, one of the world’s largest salt lakes, is rapidly losing water and drying up. This environmental hazard has raised concerns about the consequences and impact on the surrounding communities. In this paper, we use a futuristic view (horizon of 10 years based on medium-term planning) to identify the main environmental drivers in the surrounding settlements of the Urmia Lake basin. A qualitative method, based on cross-impact analysis, was used as a means of future research. We also used a Delphi-based expert panel method to collect data and extract the environmental impacts of Urmia Lake. After the three rounds of the Delphi process, the expert panel reached a high level of agreement (100%) on the top 17 environmental consequences. Then, these consequences were classified by driving force and dependency using the MICMAC method. The results show that reducing pasture area, soil and water salinity, groundwater decline and depletion, and destruction of surrounding agricultural lands play a significant role in environmental change in Urmia Lake. Overall, any small change in these variables may lead to fundamental changes in the entire system.

The overall objective of this study was to investigate urban infill development policies as a good solution to counteract urban sprawl and protect the peri-urban area of Ardabil in Northwestern Iran. In this context, we used a mixed methodology (two quantitative methods). Landsat imagery, including a patchy Landsat ETM+ for the year 2000 and a Landsat 8 for the year 2020, was used to map and assess land use to investigate sprawl and land-use change, and ArcGIS was used to investigate the potential for infill development in this city. The results show that between 2000 and 2020, 967 hectares of peri-urban land was lost to urban expansion. CA-Markov projections also showed that 452 hectares will be lost by 2030. The assessment of the city’s internal capacity for infill development showed that more than 999 hectares of land within the city are suitable to support this strategy and provide the land needed for urban expansion over the next decade. Finally, the study of the city’s master plan, which applies to all Iranian cities, discovered that there is a lack of adequate outlook regarding the amount of land available for future urban development, leading to misuse of urban land and urban sprawl in Iranian cities, suggesting that an infill development strategy could be a good way to address this issue.

Women are disadvantaged across all stages of academic publishing. In science, contribution to editorial boards of journals is evidence of a high reputation within a specialty or field. Therefore, the low presence of women on editorial boards can be considered a disadvantage indicator for women in academia. This study aims to highlight the gap in women’s contributions in land science journals. We assessed the gender composition of editorial boards in 60 peer-reviewed journals using systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and we obtained data on current and past editorial boards of these journals. The result shows that the current number of editorial board members is 5197 of which only 25.47 percent are women. Gender inequality is very evident in this group of journals to the extent that journals with a high impact factor indicate inequality that is even more than 75 percent. The results of the time series analysis have also shown that the presence of women on editorial boards has increased over the last decade, although this increase has been more in the Nordic countries. The geographical distribution of editorial board members is also quite unequal in the North and South, 83 percent of female editorial board members are from northern countries, while only 12 percent are from the global South. According to the results, there is still a long way to go to achieve gender equality, especially in the field of land science. Our results also support previous findings of a considerable gender difference in urban land science, geoscience community, biodiversity conservation, and veterinary sciences. Thus, the academic community, editors, and journals must take proactive measures to achieve gender balance.

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