In this study, the impact of different urban development scenarios on neighbourhood climate are examined. The investigation considers the relative impact differing policy/planning choices will have on the local-scale climate across a city during a typical climatological year (TCY). The aim is to demonstrate a modelling approach which couples a climate-based land classification and simple urban climate model and how this can be used to examine the impact differing urban forms and design strategies have on neighbourhood scale partitioning of energy and resulting consequences.

The drivers and pressures experienced by farmland, forestry and upland sites in the UK Environmental Change Network (ECN) over the last 20 years are reported through the lens of recognised approaches to the assessment of ecosystem service delivery. Temporal trends in ecosystem service delivery were examined using two methods: qualitative narratives and quantitative scoring of ecosystem service delivery according to land cover. While all sites included in this study are within the same national governance unit (i.e.

This research investigated the ability of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) to map tropical forest in central Sumatra, Indonesia. The study used PALSAR 50 m resolution orthorectified HH and HV data. As land-cover discrimination is difficult with only two bands (HH and HV), we added textures as additional information for classification. We calculated both first- and second-order texture features and studied the effects of texture window size, quantization scale and displacement length on discrimination capability.

We propose a framework to facilitate the evaluation of the impacts of shale gas infrastructures (well pads, roads, and pipelines) on land cover features, especially with regards to forest fragmentation. We used a geographic information system and realistic development scenarios largely inspired by the PA (United States) experience, but adapted to a region of QC (Canada) with an already fragmented forest cover and a high gas potential.

This study compares the ASTER Global DEM version 1 (GDEMv1) and version 2 (GDEMv2) for two study sites with distinct terrain and land cover characteristics in western Africa. The effects of land cover, slope, relief, and stack number are evaluated through both absolute and relative DEM statistical comparisons. While GDEMv2 at times performed better than GDEMv1, this improvement was not consistent, revealing the complex nature and interaction of terrain and land cover characteristics, which influences the accuracy of GDEM tiles on local and regional scales.

Quantifying and mapping ecosystem services (ES), their indicators and their relationships is of crucial importance for environmental management. In this article, we analyze the spatial distribution of multiple-ES indicators at three locations on the pioneer fronts of the Brazilian Amazon. We identify trade-offs and synergies between six ES indicators for soil, vegetation and biodiversity characterization.

While it is clear that many migratory behaviors are shared across taxa, generalizable models that predict the distribution and abundance of migrating taxa at the landscape scale are rare. In migratory landbirds, ephemeral concentrations of refueling birds indicate that individual behaviors sometimes produce large epiphenomena in particular geographic locations. Identifying landscape factors that predict the distribution and abundance of birds during migratory stopover will both improve our understanding of the migratory process and assist in broad, regionally relevant conservation.

- Environmental factors act in a hierarchical manner at multiple spatial scales to influence the organisation of ecological assemblages; however, the relative influence of the different scale-related factor groups is poorly known. We evaluated the importance of catchment-scale and site-scale environmental variables, as well as the spatial context of the sampling sites, in shaping stream fish assemblages in an agriculture-dominated landscape in Hungary.

Contemporary land-use change and impacts on natural systems are of concern throughout the Cornbelt region, where agricultural activities have extensively altered the landscape. Land-use changes driven by urbanization throughout this region could have a disproportionate impact on remaining natural areas, particularly forests. We used readily available data sets and software to assess land cover change for four municipalities in Iowa and to examine the usefulness of this approach for urban foresters and planners interested in understanding/predicting impacts of land cover change.

Models to predict species’ ranges have chiefly been limited to abiotic variables. However, the full ecological niche depends on a myriad of factors, both biotic and abiotic, that often correspond to completely different data types. We applied a methodology based on data mining techniques to construct ecological niche models composed of biotic as well as abiotic variables using three quite different sets of variables: climatic layers, maps of land cover and point collections of Mexican mammals.

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.