Aims & Scope

The AFRIGIST Journal of Land Administration and Environmental Management (AJLAEM, print ISSN 2756-410X, online ISSN 2756-4096) is a double-blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology (AFRIGIST), Obafemi Awolowo University Campus, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. It publishes theoretical, methodological and applied research that advances the understanding and practice of land administration and environmental management, particularly in Africa and other developing regions, and it encourages work that applies geospatial technologies to land and environmental problems. Articles are published in English or French, with abstracts in both.

SUBJECT AREAS

• Land administration and land governance — land tenure and tenure security, pro-poor and customary land administration, land-use legislation such as Nigeria's Land Use Act, access to land, land disputes and their resolution, and the relationship between land, security and development.
• Cadastral systems and land information — cadastral surveying, land registration and land records management, land information systems, and web-based and fit-for-purpose approaches to recording rights in land.
• Property management and valuation — property and estate management, land and property valuation, and land markets.
• Land-use, urban and regional planning — urban growth and its environmental effects, the loss of urban green space, the spatial structure of towns and of heritage and sacred sites, development control, rural development and spatial planning.
• Environmental management and assessment — environmental impact assessment, environmental monitoring and modelling, pollution and waste, and infrastructure and environmental planning.
• Land degradation, desertification and climate change — land cover change and degradation hotspots, desertification in dryland regions, and climate change impacts and adaptation.
• Natural resource and forest governance — classified and protected forests, community use of forest and other natural resources, resource conflicts and their management, and coastal and marine environments.
• Disaster risk management — urban and environmental hazards such as market fires, floods and erosion, their spatio-temporal patterns, and their mitigation.
• Geospatial technologies for land and environmental management — GIS, remote sensing and Earth observation, GNSS, spatial databases, UAVs, machine learning and web-based land information systems applied to land and environmental problems.

METHODS: empirical studies that state their data sources, sample and analytical approach; remote-sensing and GIS analyses of change over time, with the imagery, classification method and accuracy stated; spatial statistics and spatio-temporal analysis of incident and administrative records; household surveys, key-informant interviews and focus-group discussions; policy, legal and institutional analysis grounded in evidence; case studies with a described design; mixed-methods designs; and systematic reviews reported with a PRISMA flow.

MANUSCRIPT TYPES: original research articles, review articles, technical papers, case studies, research notes and short communications, and methodological papers. Research and review articles run to 4,000–6,000 words of main text, excluding the abstract, references, figure captions, tables and appendices. Each manuscript carries a single unstructured abstract of not more than 300 words, supplied in English and French, and at least four keywords. Text is in UK or US English used consistently, or in French; SI units are used throughout; figures are at least 600 dpi; and references follow the Harvard name–date system. Manuscripts are submitted through the journal website as a Microsoft Word .docx file of not more than 10 MB, anonymised for double-blind review: author names and affiliations are entered on the submission form and must not appear in the manuscript file.

READERSHIP: land administrators, surveyors, valuers and estate managers; urban and regional planners; environmental managers and impact-assessment practitioners; forestry, land and natural resource agencies; researchers and postgraduate students in geography, environmental science, planning, surveying and estate management; and policy makers and development partners in English- and French-speaking Africa.

OUT OF SCOPE: papers whose contribution is to a geospatial method, sensor or algorithm rather than to a land or environmental problem, which belong in the sister journal JGST; ecology, soil science, hydrology or climatology with no bearing on how land or the environment is administered, planned or managed; opinion and advocacy pieces on land or environmental policy without evidence or analysis; descriptive accounts of a project, programme or institution with no analysis; consultancy reports and unrevised student project work; building design and construction studies with no land or environmental management dimension; and manuscripts already published elsewhere or under consideration by another journal.