Review of Special Issues in the First Half of 2016

Environments was launched two years ago, in March 2014. As a young international and cross-disciplinary journal, the editorial team has been strenuously working together to achieve the goals of the journal. During the last two years, the journal has recruited editorial board members who are both well-known scholars in environmental sciences or related fields and have published quality papers as well as numerous special issues. Six ongoing special issues have been published in the first half of 2016, and will continue to be published for the remainder of this year, including Land Use Change in the Changing Environment, Climate Change and Environmental Risk, Uncertainty in PVA (Population Viability Analysis) Assessments, Data-Modelling Applications in Water System Management, Mountains in the Changing World, and Consideration of Ecosystem Services and Function for Sustainable Water Use. The issues are extremely important in dealing with complicated, cross-disciplinary environmental problems, as they provide scientific insights, solutions, techniques and policies for these problems. This editorial summarizes and reviews the six special issues for international readers, and provides some insights from the special issues. Environments consist of human and natural systems which are affected by natural processes and anthropogenic activities from global to local on a worldwide scale [1–6] (Figure 1). Accordingly, integrated studies, including human and natural systems, are essential in dealing with environmental problems from both social and natural perspectives [3]. Therefore, environmental problems should be treated as cross-disciplinary problems and should be solved via insights garnered from various fields such as land use change, climate change, environmental risk, environmental modeling, ecological conservation, water resources management, and environmental changes [5]. In the first half of this year, Environments has published the six special issues based on the perspective as presented in Figure 1. The first special issue is titled Land Use Change in the Changing Environment. Land use changes and management influence the states, properties, and functions of ecosystems, which further affect the provision of ecosystem services, as well as the human well-being [2]. Moreover, land-use changes and management along with political and socio-economic factors all directly or indirectly affect climate change [6]. Accordingly, the associations and interactions between humans and environments are widely studied [4,7–10]. Such research is indispensable since the associations and interactions are complicated and require interdisciplinary work. This special issue attempts to publish quality papers about various land-use and land-cover change issues in relation to environmental changes as well as papers which address the state-of-the-art concepts and tools for an effective analysis at different scales [7]. The subjects of this special issue can be accessed through the special issue website [7].