Land is one of the prime natural resources. A city grows not only by population but also by changes in spatial dimensions. Urban population growth and urban sprawl induced land use changes and land transformation. The land transformation is a natural process and cannot be stopped but it can be regulated. Many geographical changes at the urban periphery are associated with the transfer of land from rural to urban purpose. There is an urgent need for fast growing areas like Delhi, which can be easily done by high-resolution remote sensing data.

More than three-quarters of Mexico's coffee is grown on small plots shaded by the existing forest. Because they preserve forest cover, shade coffee farms provide vital ecological services including harboring biodiversity and preventing soil erosion. Unfortunately, tree cover in Mexico's shade coffee areas is increasingly being cleared to make way for subsistence agriculture, a direct result of the unprecedented decline of international coffee prices over the past decade.

Little is known about the habitat and ecology of suburban Barred Owls (Strix varia), a species sometimes considered the nocturnal equivalent of Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus). We compared nesting habitat of Barred Owls to that of Red-shouldered Hawks nesting in suburban and urban areas, in and near the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, to determine whether any features distinguished owl nest sites from hawk nest sites.

Human activities in many parts of the world have greatly changed the natural land cover. This study has been conducted on Pichavaram forest, south east coast of India, famous for its unique mangrove bio-diversity. The main objectives of this study were focused on monitoring land cover changes particularly for the mangrove forest in the Pichavaram area using multi-temporal Landsat images captured in the 1991, 2000, and 2009.

The wintering Great Grey Shrike Lanius excubitor was censused in Poland more than two decades ago (during the winters of 1988/89 and 1989/90). Single censuses were made during each winter on sample plots varying from 4.1 to 35.1 km² (mean: 16.4 km²). Altogether, data from 404 plots, covering in total more than 6.6 thousands km² were used for the analysis. Based on this data and environmental information gathered in GIS databases (Corine land cover ““CLC1990”” database, digital elevation model ““GTOPO30”” dataset) we modelled habitat- and spatial-related variation in shrike distribution.

The land surface models used in numerical weather forecasts and hydrological applications rely on the accuracy of land cover maps available from satellite remote sensing to simulate the energy and water balance at the surface of the Earth. While the impact of classification accuracy on land surface simulations has already been reported, little attention has been paid on the consequences of land cover map uncertainty driven by geolocation accuracy.

Freshwater lakes are known to release carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) to the atmosphere; however, the importance of lakes in global nitrous oxide (N₂O) budgets is not yet known. Further, despite the abundance of small lakes on the landscape, neither emissions of these gases nor their drivers are well described.

Sediment delivery from the Le Sueur River watershed is a major concern in the turbidity-impaired Minnesota River. As part of a broader effort to develop a sediment budget for the Le Sueur River, this study implemented a process-based watershed hydrology and upland erosion model, Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP), to simulate hydrology and sediment dynamics in several land-use/land-cover scenarios. The Geo-spatial interface for WEPP (GeoWEPP) was used to characterize upland overland flow elements based on their land use/land cover, soil, and slope profiles.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a major indicator of the impact of climate change and human activity, particularly in the Sahel, where the land cover has changed greatly over the past 50 years. Aerial and satellite sensors have been taking images of the Earth's surface for several decades. These data have been widely used to monitor LUCC, but many questions remain concerning what type of pre-processing should be carried out on image resolutions and which methods are most appropriate for successfully mapping patterns and dynamics in both croplands and natural vegetation.

Landscape pattern is of primary interest to landscape ecologists and landscape metrics are used to quantify landscape pattern. Metrics are commonly defined and calculated on raster-based land cover maps. One metric is the contagion, existing in several versions, e.g., unconditional and conditional, used as a measure of fragmentation. However, mapped data is sometimes in vector-based format or there may be no mapped data but only a point sample. In this study a definition of contagion for such cases is investigated.

This paper investigates the spatial relationships between surface fluxes and near-surface atmospheric properties (AP), and the potential errors in flux estimation due to homogeneous atmospheric inputs over heterogeneous landscapes. A large-eddy simulation (LES) model is coupled to a surface energy balance scheme with remotely sensed surface temperature Ts as a key boundary condition. Simulations were performed for different agricultural regions having major contrasts in Ts, canopy cover, and surface rough- ness z0 between vegetated/irrigated and bare soil areas.

In this paper is presented a methodological approach which integrates statistic modelling and 2-D cellular automata (CA) in order to describe tree species shifts responding to the climate changes foreseen for Italy in the 21st century. Five Italian tree species populations of Abies alba, Pinus sylvestris, Fagus sylvatica, Acer campestris and Quercus suber and their actual potential distributions (PDs) – represented by Importance Value (IV), have been considered.