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.

Depending on the researches done on urban landscapes, it is found that the heat island intensity caused by the activities in any city has some impact on the ecosystem of the region and on the regional climate. Urban areas located in arid and semiarid lands somehow represent heat increase when it is compared with the heat in the surrounding rural areas. Thus, cities located amid forested and temperate climate regions show moderate temperatures. The impervious surfaces let the rainfall leave the city lands faster than undeveloped areas.

The endozoochorous dispersal of weed seeds, mediated by birds and without any adaptation to frugivory, has been studied very rarely. We studied the endozoochorous dispersal of viable seeds by the grey partridge Perdix perdix in agricultural landscape. We assessed the content of intact seeds in 609 grey partridge droppings coming from 21 sampling sites in Poland that included three land-cover types (winter cereals, winter oil-seed rape and stubble fields). We found 159 intact seeds of 13 plant species. Most of them are classified as plants without any evolved adaptations to dispersal.

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.

Agricultural lands soil and agrochemical inspection technique in plain regions without relief digital model creation was improved. The technique is based on the differentiated study of influence of shooting ranges by the complicated cluster analysis of light reflection of ecosystems. The possibility of color channels variation in RGB system for the separate consideration of absorption of solar radiation by the soil and vegetable cover has been taken into account.

Land is the basic resource that is needed by man in order to survive: It provides humans with living space, nutrition and energy resources. The rapid growth of the human population, climate change and pollution on a catastrophic scale has caused the quality of land resources to be compromised. Remote sensing is a useful tool in land cover change detection providing information to decision makers.

Ireland provides a unique setting for the study of past climates, as its climate is dominated by westerly airflow from the North Atlantic and readily responsive to changes in North Atlantic circulation patterns. Although there has been substantial research on Ireland’s past environments, quantitative palaeolimnological research, especially chironomid-based research, has been lacking. In order to further develop chironomid-based palaeolimnological investigations, a calibration set was constructed to determine the dominant environmental controls on modern chironomids in western Ireland.