The habitat preferences of the endemic Vietnam Crocodile Newt, Tylototriton vietnamensis were investigated on two scales: (1) at Yen Tu Nature Reserve, Bac Giang Province, Vietnam, while compiling information about pond occupancy and developing a qualitative comparison among breeding sites and (2) by developing a Species Distribution Model based on climate and land cover data identifying further suitable habitats in northern Vietnam. A factor analysis followed by a multiple linear regression showed 94% support for our occupancy ranking model. Our results suggest that T.

Forest area determined from remote sensing-derived land cover maps alone at moderate resolution may not appropriately reflect dynamics of housing development in the forested wildland-urban interface (WUI). We conducted a study to quantify how housing development could affect estimates of forest carbon sequestration (FCS) in northern New England, where the percentage of WUI in relation to total land area is nearly double the national average.

Comprehensive maps that characterize the variation in agricultural landscapes across Europe are lacking. In this paper we present a new Europe-wide, spatially-explicit typology and inventory of the diversity in composition, spatial structure and management intensity of European agricultural landscapes. Agricultural landscape types were characterized at a 1km2 resolution based on Europe-wide datasets that represent land cover, landscape structure and land management intensity.

Repetitive armed conflicts may be directly and indirectly responsible for severe biophysical modification to the environment. This, in turn, makes land more susceptible to degradation. Mapping and monitoring land degradation are essential for designing and implementing post-conflict recovery plans and informed policy decisions. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of repetitive armed conflicts on land degradation along the coastal zone of North Lebanon using multi-temporal satellite data.

This article addresses the critical need for a better quantitative understanding of how water resources from the Hérault River catchment in France have been influenced by climate variability and the increasing pressure of human activity over the last 50 years. A method is proposed for assessing the relative impacts of climate and growing water demand on the decrease in discharge observed at various gauging stations in the periods 1961–1980 and 1981–2010.

Rapidly increasing demand for food, fiber, and fuel together with new technologies and the mobility of global capital are driving revolutionary changes in land use throughout the world. Efforts to increase land productivity include conversion of millions of hectares of rangelands to crop production, including many marginal lands with low resistance and resilience to degradation. Sustaining the productivity of these lands requires careful land use planning and innovative management systems.

On the basis of interactions between landscape characteristics and precipitation inputs, watersheds respond differently to different climatic inputs. The objective of this study was to quantitatively characterize controls on runoff generation from two first order micro‐catchments in the Amazonia region. The study investigated the variation of hydrological signatures at micro‐catchment scale and related these to landscape and land cover differences and weather descriptors that control the observed responses.

Classification of the Earth's surface types is one of the important remote-sensing applications of radar polarimetry. An unsupervised classification scheme based on the use of entropy and alpha angle is widely used for land-cover classification using multi-polarization radar images. The polarimetric entropy and the alpha angle are used to characterize a target's randomness and scattering mechanism, respectively. Here, we replace the entropy by the Gini index. Evaluation of the Gini index is computationally efficient.

The aim of this study is to explore the performances of different data fusion techniques for the enhancement of urban features and evaluate the features obtained by the fusion techniques in terms of separation of urban land cover classes when multisource images are under consideration. For the data fusion, multiplicative method, Brovey transform, principal component analysis (PCA), Gram–Schmidt fusion, wavelet-based fusion and Elhers fusion are used and the results are compared.

In arid and semi-arid environments, the amount of recharge received by aquifers is far more critical to the sustainable use of water than it is in humid regions. Groundwater recharge (GWR) is critical to maintain the abundance of groundwater. In the present study, suitable areas for GWR in Jazan region have been identified by using a GIS-based decision support system (DSS). The DSS was implemented to obtain suitability maps and to evaluate the existing GWR in the study area.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)/Terra daily snow cover product MOD10A1 was compared with in situ climate station measurements and a snow map generated from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data. Snow-covered area (SCA) dynamics were assessed using the MODIS 8-day snow cover composite product MOD10A2 for the 2001–2005 snow seasons in northern Xinjiang, China. The results indicate that the snow-mapping agreement between MODIS daily snow maps and surface observations is high at 94.6% over the four snow seasons under clear-sky conditions.

The diversity and abundance of wild bees ensures the delivery of pollination services and the maintenance of ecosystem diversity. As previous studies carried out in Central Europe and the US have shown, bee diversity and abundance is influenced by the structure and the composition of the surrounding landscape. Comparable studies have so far not been carried out in the Mediterranean region. The present study examines the influence of Mediterranean landscape context on the diversity and abundance of wild bees. To do this, we sampled bees in 13 sites in olive groves on Lesvos Island, Greece.