Wildfire detection systems planning is an essential component of national and regional wildfire management policies. The common resources usually used in wildfire detection are lookout towers, terrestrial mobile brigades, aerial reconnaissance and the general public.

Characterisation and mapping of land cover/land use within forest areas over long-multitemporal intervals is a complex task. This complexity is mainly due to the location and extent of such areas and, as a consequence, to the lack of full continuous cloud-free coverage of those large regions by one single remote sensing instrument. In order to provide improved long-multitemporal forest change detection using Landsat MSS and ETM + in part of Mt.

Detection of land-cover changes through time can be complicated because of sensor-specific differences in spatial and spectral resolutions; classified land-cover changes can be due to either real changes on the ground or a switch in sensors used to collect data.

Bird census data from the reed archipelago (109 islands) of Lake Velence, Hungary, were used to assess the relative importance of habitat scale variables (island area and shape, reed stand density and reed height) and landscape scale variables (distance to the nearest reed island and nearest large reed island, percentage of reed-, water- and land-cover around the islands). Habitat and landscape scale variables played a similar general role in explaining the presence of the eight observed reedbed passerines.

The relationship between vegetation and environment was investigated for calcareous grasslands in a region in the west of Spain, France, Britain and Ireland defined by climatic criteria. Vegetation was sampled using objective methods and data collected on soils, land cover, location and management. Climate data were obtained from an available database. Examination of the first axis of vegetation variation as defined by Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) showed a gradient from the Irish and British samples to those from France.

Geomorphological mapping plays an essential role in understanding Earth surface processes, geochronology, natural resources, natural hazards and landscape evolution. It involves the partitioning of the terrain into conceptual spatial entities based upon criteria that include morphology (form), genetics (process), composition and structure, chronology, environmental system associations (land cover, soils, ecology), as well as spatial topological relationships of surface features (landforms).

The relationship between landscape pattern and the distribution and spread of exotic species is an important determinant of where and when management actions are best applied. We have developed an interdisciplinary approach for prioritizing treatment of harmful, nonnative, invasive plants in National Park landscapes of the Mid-Atlantic USA.

Land use/land cover monitoring and mapping is crucial to efficient management of the land and its resources. Since the late 1980s increased attention has been paid to the use of coarse resolution optical data. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) has features, which make it particularly suitable to earth characterization purposes. MODIS has 10 products dedicated mainly to land cover characterization and provides three kinds of data: angular, spectral and temporal. MODIS data also includes information about the data quality through the ‘Quality Assessment’ product.

American badgers (Taxidea taxus) are a prairie obligate species, but badger resource selection and space use is poorly understood, particularly east of the Mississippi River where anthropogenic land uses have replaced most native prairie. We assessed badger multi-scale resource selection and space use in intensive agricultural areas in Illinois and Ohio. We predicted that badgers would select for pasture and prairie, and higher elevations, and riparian areas because these habitats likely favor burrowing and foraging.

CONTEXT: Century-long interaction between societies and their environment has shaped the cultural landscapes across Europe. Specific farming systems have persisted for long periods, and their abandonment has led to far-reaching and rapid changes in patterns of land use and land cover. OBJECTIVE: Taking the example of the municipality of Limpach, located in the Swiss lowlands, we studied the dynamics of cultural landscape and related driving forces in a long-term perspective.

This paper extends the debate on corridor effectiveness at regional planning scale, by exploring the contribution to landscape connectivity of a proposed ecological network and the remaining non-urbanized matrix in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR). Using the Ecological Connectivity Index, we evaluated the expected connectivity loss after the development of the approved urban plans in the region. Thus, we compared the baseline (present-day) and the projected (after planned urban development) connectivity scenarios for total, forest and agricultural habitats.

This paper presents an integrated approach to landscape functioning assessment combining energy efficiency and hydrochemical balance studies. Energy balance is expressed by surface temperature while hydrochemical balance is illustrated by electric conductivity and selected hydrochemical parameters. Six model sub-watersheds with different land use situated in southern Bohemia were chosen to show the influence of landscape management on landscape functioning.