The Brazilian program of payment for environmental services (PES) is based on ranges of potential erosion decrease (ED) from soil and water conservation proposals estimated from the Universal Soil Loss Equation. Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) result in many alterations of the basin water balance. Therefore, to contribute to the methodological development of Brazilian PES, this paper proposes a quantification of hydrological benefits based on conservation measures.

The purpose of this study is to understand changes in green infrastructure (GI) in the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea, focusing on the critical GI components of hubs and links. We applied a morphological analysis tool, morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), to explore GI in the Seoul metropolitan area. For input data to run MSPA, we used 30-m pixel-sized land cover data of 2000 and 2009 provided by the Ministry of Environment of Korea. Land cover data are used as foundational information for GI network mapping.

Land use and land cover change (LUCC) can modify the physical and thermodynamic characteristics of the land surface, including surface roughness, albedo, and vegetation fraction, among others. These direct changes can result in a series of impacts on regional climate. In this paper, the simulated results over China under the scenario of LUCC using weather research and forecasting model are presented. The period for the simulation is from December 2006 to December 2011. Two experiments are initialized by the LUCC datasets derived from the MODIS data of 2001 and 2008, respectively.

Landscape changes identified from multitemporal land cover databases allow the detection of the changes of individual landscape elements with high spatio-temporal precision. The similarity of the causal relations as well the characteristic states of landscape before and after change allowed us to group individual land cover changes into the landscape change types representing more complex processes in the landscape. In the paper, 13 landscape change types were proposed for the analysis of major developmental trends in the study area during the last 50 years.

Full and effective participation of indigenous peoples and local communities, and high accuracy estimates are two current requirements for the purposes of monitoring forests at international level. We produced two land cover maps, both of which were based on digital image processing (decision trees) using Rapideye imagery, and a land cover participatory map, for indigenous territories of eastern Panama. Accuracy of the three maps was evaluated using field data.

The valuation of ecosystem services can play an important role in conservation planning and ecosystem‐based management. Unfortunately, gathering primary, site‐specific data is costly. As a result, a popular alternate method is to conduct a “benefit transfer” (applying economic value estimates from one location to a similar site in another location). Among the potential pitfalls of such an approach, the correspondence (or lack thereof) between the locations is probably the most important for evaluating the probable validity of the benefit transfer.

Information on the effect of direct drivers such as hurricanes on ecosystem services is relevant to landowners and policy makers due to predicted effects from climate change. We identified forest damage risk zones due to hurricanes and estimated the potential loss of 2 key ecosystem services: aboveground carbon storage and timber volume.

Investigations of grasslands in Latvia started at the beginning of the 20ty century. One of the main goals was investigation of vegetation classification. In Latvia typology of natural grasslands in several investigation periods is based on different criterions: (1) economic typology, (2) grasslands vegetation physionomic classification according to dominant method, (3) classification of flora according to Braun-Blanquet method.

Low-lying coastal areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change as they are highly prone for inundation to SLR (Sea-Level Rise). This study presents an appraisal of the impacts of SLR on the coastal natural resources and its dependent social communities in the low-lying area of Vellar–Coleroon estuarine region of the Tamil Nadu coast, India. Digital Elevation Model (DEM) derived from SRTM 90M (Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission) data, along with GIS (Geographic Information System) techniques are used to identify an area of inundation in the study site.

Lyme disease is the United States’ most significant vector-borne illness. Virginia, on the southern edge of the disease’s currently expanding range, has experienced an increase in Lyme disease both spatially and temporally, with steadily increasing rates over the past decade and disease spread from the northern to the southwestern part of the state. This study used a Geographic Information System and a spatial Poisson regression model to examine correlations between demographic and land cover variables, and human Lyme disease from 2006 to 2010 in Virginia.

For the first time in more than a century, people across the planet are migrating en mass from cities to rural areas. In this process of ‘exurbanisation’ humans are rapidly converting natural and agricultural regions into low‐density housing. Despite the scale of this exurban development and its potential negative impact on biodiversity, little is known about how this specific type of land conversion impacts wild pollinators.