Land use is a dynamic phenomenon that changes with time and space due to anthropogenic pressure and development. Evaluating the existing land use and its periodic change is useful for urban planners, policy makers and natural resource managers. Land use and land cover changes in Mekelle City, Ethiopia (north east Africa) over a period of 25 years was studied using remotely sensed data. Multi temporal satellite data of Landsat was used to map and monitor urban land use changes occurred during two point of time of 1985 and 2010.

This study presents a novel cloud masking approach for high resolution remote sensing images in the context of land cover mapping. As an advantage to traditional methods, the approach does not rely on thermal bands and it is applicable to images from most high resolution earth observation remote sensing sensors. The methodology couples pixel-based seed identification and object-based region growing. The seed identification stage relies on pixel value comparison between high resolution images and cloud free composites at lower spatial resolution from almost simultaneously acquired dates.

Drought-induced, regional-scale dieback of forests has emerged as a global concern that is expected to escalate under model projections of climate change. Since 2000, drought of unusual severity, extent, and duration has affected large areas of western North America, leading to regional-scale dieback of forests in the southwestern US. We report on drought impacts on forests in a region farther north, encompassing the transition between boreal forest and prairie in western Canada.

Accelerated soil erosion, high sediment yields, floods and debris flow are serious problems in many areas of Iran, and in particular in the Golestan dam watershed, which is the area that was investigated in this study. Accurate land use and land cover (LULC) maps can be effective tools to help soil erosion control efforts.

Understanding changes in landscape productivity patterns is critical for management of ecosystems, characterising biodiversity, and monitoring climate change. Vegetation productivity, a key functional component of terrestrial ecosystems, can be readily monitored using remote sensing and can also be combined with other spatial information, such as land cover and topography, to provide a more comprehensive understanding, at the landscape scale, of ecosystem dynamics.

With continuing proliferation of human influences on landscapes, there is mounting incentive to undertake quantification of relationships between spatial patterns of human populations and vegetation. In considering such quantification, it is apparent that investigations must be conducted at different scales and in a comparative manner across regions. At the broader scales it becomes necessary to utilize remote sensing of vegetation for comparative studies against map referenced census data. This paper explores such an approach for the urbanized area in the Tokyo vicinity.

The influence of land use patterns on water quality in a river system is scale‐dependent. In this study, a four‐order hierarchical arrangement method was used to select water sampling sites and to delineate sub‐basins in the Daliao River Basin, China. The 20 sub‐basins were classified into four spatial scales that represented four different stream orders. Pearson correlation analysis was used to quantify relationships between land use composition and the river's physical‐chemical variables for all samples collected.

Global biodiversity is changing rapidly driven by human alteration of habitat, and nowhere this is more dramatic than in insular habitats. Yet land-cover change is a complex phenomenon that not only involves habitat destruction but also forest recovery over different time scales. Therefore, we might expect species to respond in diverse ways with likely consequences for the reorganization of regional assemblages. These changes, however, may be different in tropical islands because of their low species richness, generalist habits and high proportion of endemics.

Calibration and validation of soil moisture satellite products requires data records of large spatial and temporal extent and for diverse land cover types. Obtaining this data, especially for forests, can be challenging. These challenges can include the remoteness of the locations, and expense of equipment. A location with a long record of soil water content data and the potential provide this important data is the Boreal Ecosystem Research and Monitoring Sites (BERMS) in Saskatchewan Canada. In and around the BERMS study area, there are five long-term soil water content profile stations.

A total of 458 in situ hyperspectral data were collected from 13 urban tree species in the City of Tampa, FL, USA using a spectrometer. The 13 species include 11 broadleaf and two conifer species. Three different techniques, segmented canonical discriminant analysis (CDA), segmented principal component analysis (PCA) and segmented stepwise discriminate analysis (SDA), were applied and compared for dimension reduction and feature extraction.

The impact of land-cover types on soil erosion and runoff, as well as on physico-chemical soil properties, was monitored. The study area, an agroforestry landscape was located in Sierra Nevada Mountains in south-eastern Spain. Eight land-cover types were investigated: farmland planted with olive, almond, and cereals; forest with P. halepensis and P. sylvestris; shrubland; grassland; and abandoned farmland. The erosion plots replicated twice were located on hillslopes, where erosion and runoff were measured after 22 storm events.

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) contains crop and other specific land cover classifications obtained using remote sensing for the conterminous United States. This raster-formatted and geo-referenced product has been widely used in such applications as disaster assessments, land cover and land use research, agricultural sustainability studies, and agricultural production decision-making. The traditional CDL data distribution channels include paper thematic maps, email data requests, CD/DVD media, and ftp bulk downloading.