The rapid growth of urban population in India is a cause of concern among country’s urban and town planners for efficient urban planning. The drastic growth of urban areas has resulted in sharp land use and land cover changes. In recent years, the significance of spatial data technologies, especially the application of remotely sensed data and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used. The present study investigates the urban growth of Tiruchirapalli city, Tamilnadu using IRS satellite data for the years 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010.

The hydrology of boreal regions is strongly influenced by seasonal snow accumulation and melt. In this study, we compare simulations of snow water equivalent (SWE) and streamflow by using the hydrological model HYDROTEL with two contrasting approaches for snow modelling: a mixed degree‐day/energy balance model (small number of inputs, but several calibration parameters needed) and the thermodynamic model CROCUS (large number of inputs, but no calibration parameter needed).

Northeast Asia is an area with relative concentrations of resources, a complex ecological environment pattern, and a marked human—land contrast relationship. This area has significance for analyzing land cover patterns and variations for regional sustainable development among the trans-boundary areas of China, Russia, and Mongolia. In this paper, the transect analysis research tool and transfer matrix method are used to capture the regional land cover change characteristics by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS) datasets recorded from 2001 to 2012.

Simulations of dispersal across computer-generated neutral landscapes have generated testable predictions about the relationship between dispersal success and landscape structure. Models predict a threshold response in dispersal success with increasing habitat fragmentation. A threshold is defined as an abrupt, disproportionate decline in dispersal success at a certain proportion of habitat in the landscape.

CONTEXT: Changing global environmental conditions, especially at northern latitudes, are threatening to shift species distributions and alter wildlife communities. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to establish current distributions and community arrangements of small mammals to provide important baselines for monitoring and conserving biodiversity into the future. METHODS: We used 4,408 archived museum and open-access records and the machine learning algorithm, RandomForests, to create high-resolution spatial niche models for 17 species of rodents and shrews in Alaska.

Small blanket bog lakes can contain many rare and threatened aquatic invertebrate species. Their conservation value, however, is threatened throughout Europe by peat extraction and particularly conifer afforestation, which can compromise the physico-chemical habitat quality of peatland lakes through excessive inputs of forestry-derived dissolved and particulate substances.

Although agricultural intensification is thought to pose a significant threat to species, little is known about its role in driving biodiversity loss at regional scales. I assessed the effects of a major component of agricultural intensification, agricultural chemical use, and land‐cover and climatic variables on butterfly diversity across 81 provinces in Turkey, where agriculture is practiced extensively but with varying degrees of intensity.

Wetlands are impacted by surrounding land use and land cover (LULC), but little information is available specifically on headwater wetlands. A total of 30 headwater wetlands were examined in coastal Alabama, USA, representing a range of surrounding LULC. Percent cover by forest, agriculture, and impervious surface area (ISA) (i.e., urban land use) were quantified in each corresponding watershed.

The dissected volcanic terrains around Limbe, SW Cameroon are frequently affected by small scale but destructive landslides. In this study, a raster-based data driven method involving seed cells is used to build a landslide susceptibility model for the Limbe area. Factors considered to be potential controls of slope failure within this area include slope gradient, rock type, distance from roads, slope orientation, mean annual precipitation, soil type, land cover type, stream density and distance from stream.

Nutrient export coefficients are estimates of the mass of nitrogen (N) or phosphorus (P) normalized by area and time (e.g., kg/ha/yr). They have been estimated most often for watersheds ranging in size from 10² to 10⁴ hectares, and have been recommended as measurements to inform management decisions. At this scale, watersheds are often nested upstream and downstream components of larger drainage basins, suggesting nutrient export coefficients will change from one subwatershed to the next. Nutrient export can be modeled as risk where lack of monitoring data prevents empirical estimation.

The paper describes an efficient approach for mapping multiple individual tree species over large spatial domains. The method integrates vegetation phenology derived from MODIS imagery and raster data describing relevant environmental parameters with extensive field plot data of tree species basal area to create maps of tree species abundance and distribution at a 250-m pixel size for the entire eastern contiguous United States.

As data sets of multiple types and scales proliferate, it will be increasingly important to be able to flexibly combine them in ways that retain relevant information. A case in point is Amazonia, a large, data-poor region where most whole-basin data sets are limited to understanding land cover interpreted through a variety of remote sensing techniques and sensors. A growing body of work, however, indicates that the future state of much of Amazonia depends on the land use to which converted areas are put, but land use in the tropics is difficult to assess from remotely sensed data alone.