This study examined pollution and shrinkage of urban lakes in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. A mixed‐method approach was employed, nested within the European Environmental Agency Drivers, Pressure, States, Impacts, Responses Framework and Environmental Systems Analysis tools (as stakeholder and functions analysis methodologies). A variety of stakeholders and policymakers were first interviewed, being asked to participate in an exercise identifying their perceptions of the greatest challenges facing urban lakes in Dhaka.

PURPOSE: The study aimed to use the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to simulate erosion processes in an alpine–prealpine catchment in order to provide data and information that may be relevant for managers so as to minimize reservoir siltation and water quality degradation. The main objective was to assess sediment production across the catchment and sediment supply to the main reservoir. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Barasona reservoir catchment (1,509� km²) is located in the Central Spanish Pyrenees, in the Ebro Basin.

Land-use land-cover change is one of the most important and direct drivers of changes in ecosystem functions and services. Given the complexity of the decision-making, there is a need for Internet-based decision support systems with scenario evaluation capabilities to help planners, resource managers and communities visualize, compare and consider trade-offs among the many values at stake in land use planning.

Forestry plantations represent about 4� % of the global land cover and demand for wood is steadily increasing worldwide. Impacts of forest plantations on biodiversity are controversial; forest plantations could positively influence biodiversity by producing a buffer zone between native forests and agriculture, while replacement of native forests with plantations could reduce biodiversity. Chile is one of the main producers of wood worldwide, and production is largely based on intensively managed monocultures of exotic tree species.

AIM: Habitat heterogeneity has long been recognized as a key landscape characteristic determining biodiversity patterns. However, a lack of standardized, large‐scale, high‐resolution and temporally updatable heterogeneity information based on direct observations has limited our understanding of this connection and its effective use for biodiversity conservation. To address this, we develop here remote sensing‐based metrics to characterize global habitat heterogeneity at 1‐km resolution and assess their value for biodiversity modelling. LOCATION: Global.

Carbon exchange associated with accelerated erosion following land cover change is an important component of the global C cycle. In current assessments, however, this component is not accounted for. Here, we integrate the effects of accelerated C erosion across point, hillslope, and catchment scale for the 780-km ² Dijle River catchment over the period 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2000 to demonstrate that accelerated erosion results in a net C sink.

This study compiles the latest regional topographic data from field investigation and remote-sensing images to recalculate parameters of the universal soil loss equation (USLE) model of the Shenmu watershed; also to compensate for reduced accuracy of this model on small-scale slopes, this study incorporates soil erosion pin data which were collected periodically to measure the extent of soil erosion.

The fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) absorbed by a vegetation canopy is an important variable for global vegetation modelling and is operationally available from data of the Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite sensor starting from the year 2000. Product validation is ongoing and important for constant product improvement, but few studies have investigated the specific accuracy of MODIS FPAR using in situ measurements and none have focused on agricultural areas.

We report the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover changes from 1954 to 2008 in a hilly mountainous area in the Italian northern Apennine, and ecological factors and processes associated with these dynamics. Land cover patches were mapped and analysed at three time periods (1954, 1980 and 2008). Changes over time were detected by analysing a combination of multitemporal source data from airborne images and from field surveys. Relationships between cover classes and environmental variables were analysed for the year 2008.

Based on the Regional Integrated Environmental Model System (RIEMS 2.0) developed by START TEA-COM RRC and Department of Atmospheric Science of Nanjing University, a dataset of observation and remote sensing over the Heihe River Basin (HRB) was used to recalibrate the model’s parameters, including topography elevation, land cover type, saturated soil water potential, saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, field moisture capacity, wilting point moisture, soil porosity, and parameter b of soil hydraulic conductivity, to build a high-resolution regional climate model for the HRB.

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological/water quality model divides a watershed into hydrological response units (HRUs) based on unique land cover, soil type, and slope. HRUs are a set of discontinuous land masses that are spatially located in the watershed but their responses are not tied to any particular field. Field_SWAT, a simple graphical user interface (GUI)-driven tool, was developed to map SWAT simulations from the HRU layer to a user-defined field boundaries layer.