Changing environmental and socio-economic conditions make land degradation, a major concern in Central and East Asia. Globally satellite imagery, particularly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, has proved an effective tool for monitoring land cover change. This study examines 33 grassland water points using vegetation field studies and remote sensing techniques to track desertification on the Mongolian plateau.

We investigated the distribution, storage and landscape partitioning of soil amorphous silica (ASi) in a central Canadian region dominated by tundra and peatlands to provide a first estimate of the amount of ASi stored in Arctic permafrost ecosystems. We hypothesize that, similar to soil organic matter, Arctic soils store large amounts of ASi which may be affected by projected climate changes and associated changes in permafrost regimes. Average soil ASi storage (top 1 m) ranged between 9600 and 83,500 kg SiO₂ ha⁻¹among different land-cover types.

Wildfire detection systems planning is an essential component of national and regional wildfire management policies. The common resources usually used in wildfire detection are lookout towers, terrestrial mobile brigades, aerial reconnaissance and the general public.

Characterisation and mapping of land cover/land use within forest areas over long-multitemporal intervals is a complex task. This complexity is mainly due to the location and extent of such areas and, as a consequence, to the lack of full continuous cloud-free coverage of those large regions by one single remote sensing instrument. In order to provide improved long-multitemporal forest change detection using Landsat MSS and ETM + in part of Mt.

Detection of land-cover changes through time can be complicated because of sensor-specific differences in spatial and spectral resolutions; classified land-cover changes can be due to either real changes on the ground or a switch in sensors used to collect data.

Bird census data from the reed archipelago (109 islands) of Lake Velence, Hungary, were used to assess the relative importance of habitat scale variables (island area and shape, reed stand density and reed height) and landscape scale variables (distance to the nearest reed island and nearest large reed island, percentage of reed-, water- and land-cover around the islands). Habitat and landscape scale variables played a similar general role in explaining the presence of the eight observed reedbed passerines.

The relationship between vegetation and environment was investigated for calcareous grasslands in a region in the west of Spain, France, Britain and Ireland defined by climatic criteria. Vegetation was sampled using objective methods and data collected on soils, land cover, location and management. Climate data were obtained from an available database. Examination of the first axis of vegetation variation as defined by Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) showed a gradient from the Irish and British samples to those from France.

A global validation database that can be used to assess the accuracy of multiple global and regional land-cover maps would yield significant cost savings and enhance comparisons of accuracy of different maps. Because the global validation database should expand over time as new validation data are contributed, the sampling design must be constructed so that it is simple to increase the sample size from a specific region (e.g. a continent or country) or from targeted land-cover classes to improve standard errors of the accuracy estimates.

There is strong pressure to embrace indicators for practical goals such as nature conservation and management and to evaluate the restoration success, but the selection of appropriate indicators is not straightforward. In addition, the grain and the type of data collected and data transformation adopted can influence restoration monitoring results. In this paper, we assessed the effect of changing indicator, grain size (i.e., plot dimension) and data transformation in discriminating different mapped plant communities, relying on vascular plant composition data.

PURPOSE: To assess the diverse environmental impacts of land use, a standardization of quantifying land use elementary flows is needed in life cycle assessment (LCA). The purpose of this paper is to propose how to standardize the land use classification and how to regionalize land use elementary flows. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In life cycle inventories, land occupation and transformation are elementary flows providing relevant information on the type and location of land use for land use impact assessment.

This study evaluates the relationship between landscape accessibility and land cover change in Western Honduras, and demonstrates how these relationships are influenced by social and economic processes of land use change in the region. The study area presents a complex mosaic of land cover change processes that involve approximately equal amounts of reforestation and deforestation.

The relationship between landscape pattern and the distribution and spread of exotic species is an important determinant of where and when management actions are best applied. We have developed an interdisciplinary approach for prioritizing treatment of harmful, nonnative, invasive plants in National Park landscapes of the Mid-Atlantic USA.