We are pleased to invite you to submit an abstract to the Pre-IGU 2016 Conference Workshop — Land Use and Rural Sustainability that will be held in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province,China on August 17-20, 2016, under the auspices of the National Natural Science Foundation of Chinaand the National Social Science Foundation of China. The workshop will be co-organized by the following organizations:Institue of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS);Key Laboratory of Degraded and Unused Land Consolidation Engineering, The Ministry of Land and Resources of China;Beijing Normal University;Shaanxi Normal University;the journal Land Use Policy (published byElsevier); and the Department of Geography, Environment and Population, University of Adelaide.

Land conversion from its natural state to human use is often an irreversible effect of human interaction with the natural environment. The transformation of human socio-economic activities exerts further impacts on land-use change and associated policy making, especially in developing countries over recent decades. As the most populous nation, China has undergone rapid and intense socio-economic transformations during recent decades, a process that has been accompanied by rapid land-use changes and modifications affecting all sectors of the country’s economy. In the meantime, urbanization has also had profound impacts on rural areas, which have witnessed depopulation, farmland loss, abandoned residential land, ‘hollowed villages’, environmental problems and declining development capability. Key questions arising are:How to revitalize the decaying villages? How to further improve land use productivity whilstachievingmore sustainable development? How to implement rural restructuring and improve rural transformational development? What are the connections between land use and rural development? What experiences from other parts of the world can be applied in China?