Urban expansion is a form of land cover and land use change (LCLUC) that occurs globally, and population growth can be a driver of and be driven by LCLUC. Determining the cause–effect relationship is challenging because the temporal resolution of population data is limited by decadal censuses for most countries. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship and relative timing between population change and land use change based on a case study of northern Taiwan from 1990 to 2015.

In an attempt to curb urban land growth and protect environmentally sensitive areas during the urbanization period, urban containment policies in different forms have been implemented over the last three decades at the national and local levels. In this study, we measure the extent of environmentally sensitive area loss in the rural–urban fringe of Wuhan City, where massive urban development has taken place, using 34 years of land use data.

In this paper, the government behavior of leasing different land use rights in Beijing, China, is analyzed using data analysis based on the multinomial logit model. The factors that lead the government to lease different land use rights are considered from the aspects of the land features, geographical location of the land, district economic development, government finance and political tenure of the district head, etc.