In scope of an IWRM concept for the Federal District, Western Central Brazil we developed a planning support tool, which enables non-experts to test the effects of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) on landscape processes and landscape functions (LPF) related to sediment generation and retention. For this purpose we developed the web-based tool Letsmap do Brasil. The tool has two principal layers. The upper layer contains information on land use and its effect on LPF, i.e. sediment retention, runoff control, nitrogen loss control and agronomic value.

It is important to identify nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from non-point sources (NPS) to protect watershed water quality. However, few studies have been conducted in a large basin to determine the sources and causal factors of N and P from multiple land use and soil types. In this study, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied in support of the Small-scale Watershed Extended Method (SWEM) in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region (TGRR), China. The first-order error analysis (FOEA) was used to identify the key sub-processes that affected the occurrence of NPS pollution.

Human land use contributes significantly to the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in land management practices have been proposed as a critical and cost-effective mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the storage of additional carbon in vegetation and soils. However many discussions of the potential for land use to mitigate climate change only take into account biophysical factors such as vegetation and land cover and neglect how the agency of land owners themselves affects whether additional carbon storage can be achieved.

Super resolution mapping is a continuously growing area of remote sensing. Satellite images coupled with a very high spectral resolution, and are suitable for detection and classification of surfaces and different elements in the observed image. The main problem with high resolution data for these applications is the (relatively) low spatial resolution, which can vary from a few to tens of meters.

Climate change in the Mediterranean is expected to lead to lower total rainfall and soil moisture, together with higher storm intensities; different vegetation types are expected to react positively or negatively to these and other changes. Climate change could therefore have positive or negative impacts on runoff and soil erosion during storms, and previous research has indicated that the impacts could be different at the field, hillslope and catchment scales.

The country of Spain is representative of land change processes in Mediterranean member states of the European Union (EU). These land change processes are often triggered by European, national and sub-national policies and include widespread land abandonment and urbanisation trends, as well as an increase in land use intensities accompanied by strong exploitation of water resources. The Mediterranean is part of the dryland ecoregion, which is particularly vulnerable to ecosystem degradation.

Quantification of landscape pattern is of primary interest in landscape ecological studies. For quantification purposes, a large number of landscape metrics have been developed, with definitions based on measurable patch attributes. Calculation of these metrics is commonly conducted on wall-to-wall maps, whereas a new interest is to use sample data. It is argued that a sample survey takes less time and results are more reliable. The overall objective in this paper was to present the potential of the line interest sampling method for estimating a special contagion metric.

A large wetland drainage project was initiated in 1912 near the town of Seney, Michigan, U.S.A. This project included the construction of a series of ditches through a large peatland to drain the land for agricultural use. The largest of these ditches was the 35 km long Walsh Ditch. Much of the drained wetland affected by the Walsh Ditch is now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

CONTEXT: Weather surveillance radars (WSR) have been used to locate roost sites used by Purple Martins (Progne subis) for decades. Improvements in radar data processing and accessibility now make it possible to monitor roosts over a broad spatial scale. OBJECTIVES: We sought to locate all of the Purple Martin roosts in North America and to use the data to evaluate (1) the land cover types associated with roosts (2) relationships among roost persistence, land cover type, and regional population trends.

Given historical patterns of decline, the American Black Duck (Anas rubripes) has long been a species of concern. To support the identification of core Maritime habitat, the distribution of breeding ducks was mapped at the landscape scale through the combination of GIS-based land cover information and five years of intensive aerial surveys (2006–2010). A predictive, mixed effects model was used to generate the maps, based on the weighted average of coefficients for the top 95% of all-possible models (as measured by AIC weights).

CONTEXT: The urban heat island (UHI) is a well-documented pattern of warming in cities relative to rural areas. Most UHI research utilizes remote sensing methods at large scales, or climate sensors in single cities surrounded by standardized land cover. Relatively few studies have explored continental-scale climatic patterns within common urban microenvironments such as residential landscapes that may affect human comfort.