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Summary: Rural areas have a very important role in society and the economy. They provide residence and employment and also serve as recreational sites, enabling visitors to enjoy unspoiled nature. Rural areas not only supply raw materials and products, but they also provide space for other functions. Spatial planning has a very important role in the process of rural space modeling. It is also important to study local and external conditions. A rural development framework can be proposed based on an evaluation of the observed phenomena. The following list provides some examples of topics of interest to ensure the consistency of the papers in this Special Issue: - Spatial planning;- Spatial order;- Institutional efficiency;- Spatial, financial, and environmental effects of planning studies;- The urbanization of rural areas;- Town-village relationships;- Social, cultural, economic, environmental, and spatial aspects of rural development. Dynamically growing new technologies (e.g., multi-criteria methods and GIS tools) are gaining popularity worldwide as tools for use in spatial analysis. This Special Issue focuses on the practice and theory of the application of modern technologies in rural space modeling and rural area development planning.The monograph includes papers on contemporary research directions on rural space modeling in areas such as spatial planning, spatial order, spatial-temporal analysis, land use change, environmental aspects, etc. The integration of different data, GIS tools and modeling can provide valuable support for rural space modeling and decision making.

Summary: Effective environmental decision-making is often challenging and complex, where final solutions frequently possess inherently subjective political and socio-economic components. Consequently, complex sustainability applications in the "real world" frequently employ computational decision-making approaches to construct solutions to problems containing numerous quantitative dimensions and considerable sources of uncertainty. This volume includes a number of such applied computational analytics papers that either create new decision-making methods or provide innovative implementations of existing methods for addressing a wide spectrum of sustainability applications, broadly defined. The disparate contributions all emphasize novel approaches of computational analytics as applied to environmental decision-making and sustainability analysis - be this on the side of optimization, simulation, modelling, computational solution procedures, visual analytics, and/or information technologies.

Summary: This book collects fifteen papers published in s Special Issue of Mathematics titled "Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics", which was published in 2021. These paper cover a wide range of different tools from Fuzzy Set Theory and applications in many areas of Business Management and other connected fields. Specifically, this book contains applications of such instruments as, among others, Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Neuro-Fuzzy Methods, the Forgotten Effects Algorithm, Expertons Theory, Fuzzy Markov Chains, Fuzzy Arithmetic, Decision Making with OWA Operators and Pythagorean Aggregation Operators, Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The papers in this book tackle a wide variety of problems in areas such as strategic management, sustainable decisions by firms and public organisms, tourism management, accounting and auditing, macroeconomic modelling, the evaluation of public organizations and universities, and actuarial modelling. We hope that this book will be useful not only for business managers, public decision-makers, and researchers in the specific fields of business management, finance, and economics but also in the broader areas of soft mathematics in social sciences. Practitioners will find methods and ideas that could be fruitful in current management issues. Scholars will find novel developments that may inspire further applications in the social sciences.

Summary: The available range of ornamental plants (cut flowers, potted plants, perennials, bulbous, woody ornamental plants) is constantly being supplemented with new species and cultivars; thus, new methods for their production are required. The sustainable development of the floriculture industry requires modern and environmentally friendly solutions that can maximize the plant's potential. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt flower production methods to actual conditions and take into account the energy transformation and biological, technical, and organizational advances. This Special Issue is a collection of seven well-written research works covering the current state-of-the-art of ornamental crop production. The main body of the Special Issue gives an interesting coverage of new strategies that can be utilized for plant reproduction, regulating their growth and flowering, adapting production technologies to fit the concept of sustainable development, and optimizing supply chain management. This Special Issue will provide a good reference source for growers, research scientists, and advanced undergraduate students.

Summary: Achieving economic growth and sustainable development requires that we urgently reduce our ecological footprint by changing the way we produce and consume goods and resources. We consume more resources than the planet can generate, and growing rates of pollution and waste only worsen the problem. In this context, globally, a significant number of frameworks and programs on sustainable consumption and production have been introduced. Most of them concern the environmentally sound management of energy and raw materials and all wastes throughout their life cycle; the substantially reduce of waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse; the adoption of sustainable practices and the integration of sustainability information into their reporting cycle; the promotion of procurement practices that are sustainable; the enhancement of scientific and technological capacity intending to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production etc. This reprint" Sustainable Production and Environmentally Responsible Consumption" takes a broad view of all these issues and aimed to inform about ways contributing to sustainable consumption and production by reducing our environmental impact, promoting the use of renewable sources of energy and encouraging responsible purchasing decisions.

Summary: In light of the considerable impact of global food supply chains on climate change, more sustainable ways of producing, distributing, and consuming food appear critical for sustainable development. With the aim of contributing to this topic, this Special Issue on sustainable food consumption and food marketing addresses various relevant issues related to food consumption, including innovative and sustainable forms of food production and consumption, animal welfare and meat consumption, price transmission, social media communication, alternative food production, and organic agriculture, among others. As such, this Special Issue sheds light on more sustainable and carbon-friendly food production and consumption systems from various angles. It delivers valuable scientific evidence for the transformation of current carbon-based food supply chains to more eco-friendly, fair, and future-oriented food supply chains.

Summary: Providing the security of a broad-based energy and slowing the speed of climate change are the main challenges today of the basic of legal framework to stimulate the development of alternative energy sources. Energy from renewable sources is one part of the system, which not only enables to provide energy self-sufficiency, but also contributes to the reduction heating of the Earth's atmosphere. International climate agreements indicate the need to intensify the prevention of global warming and accelerate the reduction in CO2 emissions. The implementation of such challenging plans as outlined in the European Green Deal or "Fit for 55," among others, entails the almost complete elimination of GHG emissions in the energy sector, which can be very challenging for some member states. In the EU, the preferred direction of development of RES use is distributed generation and increasing the share of the use of by-products and organic waste for the production biofuels. This creates great opportunities for rural areas, which until the last century were identified with agriculture and the production of food or raw materials. While the role of agriculture will not diminish, as incomes are rising in relatively poor countries with a high elasticity of demand for food, these areas will increasingly perform a number of other important functions as well. The production of energy raw materials and energy, which is no longer a mere idea, but is becoming, thanks to the development of new technologies, a mainstream energy sector that can make contribution to improving energy security and achieving climate neutrality.

Summary: This book is a compilation of articles published in the Special Issue "Sensory and Consumer Research for a Sustainable Food System" of the journal Foods. The compilation includes 18 original research articles, 2 review articles, and 1 editorial. The articles show how sensory and consumer research can contribute to the development of a sustainable food system.

Summary: This book focuses on the analysis, design and implementation of future smart grid systems. This book contains eleven chapters, which were originally published after rigorous peer-review as a Special Issue in the International Journal of Energies (Basel). The chapters cover a range of work from authors across the globe and present both the state-of-the-art and emerging paradigms across a range of topics including sustainability planning, regulations and policy, estimation and situational awareness, energy forecasting, control and optimization and decentralisation. This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and scholars working in areas related to future smart grid systems.

Summary: The synthesis of enantiopure organic compounds is a key issue for several applications in pharmacology, food chemistry, agricultural chemistry, perfumery, materials science and other industrial sectors. Nowadays, asymmetric catalysis is undoubtedly the most important tool to achieve this goal. This technology, in fact, enables the production of large amounts of enantiomerically enriched compounds, employing relatively small quantities of chiral enantiopure catalysts, which is exactly what is accomplished by enzymes in nature. Since the pioneering works of Noyori, Knowles and Sharpless, which later earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, asymmetric catalysis has experienced a rapid and relentless development in the last fifty years. The tremendous expansion of enantioselective transformations, the design of novel and more efficient organometallic and organic catalysts, the development of sophisticated bioreactors and cell factories, are just some of the elements responsible for such growth. However, new challenges of asymmetric catalysis are devoted to enhancing the process's sustainability, by the introduction of recyclable and low-cost catalysts, and the use of renewable starting materials and energy source. This book provides an overview of some of these development directions and comprises a collection of review papers and a research article authored by renowned researchers actively involved in this field. The topics covered by the review papers are photoredox-catalyzed reactions of imines, asymmetric catalytic electrosynthesis, cooperative catalysis of chiral N-heterocyclic carbenes and Lewis acid, and asymmetric ring-opening reactions of epoxides catalyzed by metal-salen complexes. The research article presents a proline-catalyzed aldol reaction in water-methanol solvent mixture.