Mining activities for mineral resources over the years have resulted in major soil damage. Due the removal process of desired mineral materials, soil textures have been destroyed, various nutrient cycles have been disturbed, and microbial communities have been altered, affecting vegetation and leading to the destruction of wide areas of land in many countries. Therefore, soil restoration of abandoned mining lands became a very important part of sustainable development strategies and also prescribed by law in several countries. The main aims of this study were to develop an ecological land restoration strategy to the degraded lands due former kaolin, quartz sand, and iron mining located in Aghireșu and Căpușu Mare in Cluj County, in the Northwestern part of Transylvania from Romania and monitor soil quality changes over 40 years. To assess the effectiveness of soil reclamation of mine lands, 30 soil profiles were examined and 450 soil samples were collected from three depths (0–20 cm, 20–50 cm, and 50–80 cm) and subjected to physical and chemical analyses, and compared for their sustainable and beneficial use. All the proposed plant covers (natural grassland, pasture cover, black locust, Norway spruce, and scots pine) significantly improved the overall soil quality with the increasing years of reclamation following various patterns. Pasture cover most significantly enhanced the soil’s microbial activity, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium content followed by natural grassland. The results of this study show that considerable changes in soil quality was reached by revegetation of these abandoned mine lands restoring their ecological integrity and self-sustainability.

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The purpose of the present study was to compare the prediction performances of three statistical methods, namely, information value (IV), weight of evidence (WoE) and frequency ratio (FR), for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) at the east of Constantine region. A detailed landslide inventory of the study area with a total of 81 landslide locations was compiled from aerial photographs, satellite images and field surveys. This landslide inventory was randomly split into a testing dataset (70%) for training the models, and the remaining (30%) was used for validation purpose. Nine landslide-related factors such as slope gradient, slope aspect, elevation, distance to streams, lithology, distance to lineaments, precipitation, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and stream density were used in the landslide susceptibility analyses. The inventory was adopted to analyse the spatial relationship between these landslide factors and landslide occurrences. Based on IV, WoE and FR approaches, three landslide susceptibility zonation maps were categorized, namely, “very high, high, moderate, low, and very low”. The results were compared and validated by computing area under Road the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). From the statistics, it is noted that prediction scores of the FR, IV and WoE models are relatively similar with 73.32%, 73.95% and 79.07%, respectively. However, the map, obtained using the WoE technique, was experienced to be more suitable for the study area. Based on the results, the produced LSM can serve as a reference for planning and decision-making regarding the general use of the land.

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The project InterGEO was carried out with the objective to disseminate knowledge on geomorphological heritage by developing a digital learning platform. It aims at improving students' autonomy by the reduction of face-to-face teaching and increasing autonomous learning as well as promoting international interactions between students interested in geomorphological heritage. A completely free-access virtual course on geomorphosites was developed with the Learning Management System Moodle. The course is divided into 24 thematic chapters, each of them containing a short description, a list of references and selected publications, as well as other educational material (videos, virtual fieldtrips, etc.). In particular, several videos allow presenting in a dynamic way concepts and examples. The paper presents the tool and its use in academic programmes in six European universities, where it was tested, in various contexts (Bachelors' and Masters' programmes; students in geography or geology; general courses in geomorphology and specific courses on geoheritage and geoconservation), before discussing the advantages and challenges the tool is facing. The InterGEO platform is an easy-to-use and friendly educational tool, which allows developing blended learning activities; it is flexible and adaptable in various learning contexts.