Historic land‐cover/use change is important for studies on climate change, soil carbon, and biodiversity assessments. Available reconstructions focus on the net area difference between two time steps (net changes) instead of accounting for all area gains and losses (gross changes). This leads to a serious underestimation of land‐cover/use dynamics with impacts on the biogeochemical and environmental assessments based on these reconstructions.

Mesoamerican biodiversity is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic destruction of natural land cover. Habitat degradation and climate change are primary threats to specialized forest odonate species that are important model organisms for forest health and defining conservation units. The extreme niche specialization of Megaloprepus caerulatus, the world’s largest extant odonate, makes it well suited as an indicator for changing environmental conditions.

This paper explores which physical landscape components relate to subjective landscape dimensions. The ways in which people describe their surrounding cultural landscape was analyzed through an assessment of their representations of it. A special focus was placed on assessing the role of land cover as a means to communicate landscape meanings regarding a specific geographical region. The methodological framework was built on the basis of a questionnaire survey, multivariate statistical analysis and mapping approaches.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes among three study areas with different biophysical environments in the Brazilian Amazon at multiple scales, from per-pixel, polygon, census sector, to study area. Landsat images acquired during the years of 1990/1991, 1999/2000, and 2008/2010 were used to examine LULC change trajectories with the post-classification comparison approach.

In this study we analyzed the response of monthly runoff to precedent climatic conditions at temporal scales of 1–48months in 88 catchments of the Ebro basin (northeast Spain). The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) was used to summarize the climatic conditions at different time scales, and was correlated with the standardized streamflow index (SSI) calculated at the mouth of each catchment. The Ebro basin encompasses a gradient from Atlantic to Mediterranean climates, and has remarkable complexity in topography, geology and land cover.

Recent European research projects have developed approaches that downscale land use related results of economic models. These results are primarily downscaled from the national or regional scale to a spatial resolution appropriate for environmental impact analysis. Different studies represent the interactions between the economic and geographic components of the land system in different ways. This paper explores how interactions between economic and geographic aspects of the land system can be strengthened in modelling studies.

This paper represents the first national effort of its kind to systematically investigate the impact of changes in climate and land use and land cover (LULC) on the carbon cycle with high-resolution dynamic LULC data at the decadal scale (1990s and 2000s).

Sustainable water resources management plans depend on reliable monitoring of land use –land cover (LULC) changes. The use of the remote sensing techniques in LULC changes detection brings consistency and reliability to the decision maker at regional scale. Three temporal data sets of images were used to obtain the land cover changes in this study: Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) acquired in 1984, and Landsat-7 enhanced Thematic Mapper acquired in 2000 and 2005 consequently. Each temporal data set consists of four Landsat scenes, which were mosaicked to cover the whole Nile Delta.

Net primary productivity (NPP) is an important component of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Accurately mapping the spatial-temporal variations of NPP in China is crucial for global carbon cycling study. In this study the process-based Boreal Ecosystem Productivity Simulator (BEPS) was employed to study the changes of NPP in China’s ecosystems for the period from 2000 to 2010. The BEPS model was first validated using gross primary productivity (GPP) measured at typical flux sites and forest NPP measured at different regions.

In Indonesia, vegetation fires occur every year in the dry season. To determine where and why fires occur, the natural and cultural landscape features that influence the location of fires were analysed. We investigated the probability of fire occurrence as a function of predisposing conditions and ignition sources, such as land use, land use zoning, accessibility or land cover, to understand the spatial determinants of fires. The study area is the entire province of Jambi, central Sumatra, Indonesia.

Most existing multi-temporal classification studies use spectral information alone and ignore the temporal correlation between two-date images. This article proposes a new method to characterize the local temporal correlation using multi-temporal texture measured with a geostatistical function called the pseudo cross variogram (PCV). The derived multi-temporal texture, as an additional band, was combined with the spectral information in multi-temporal classification.

This study provides a framework for the joint analysis of long-term land cover changes and climatic variations at regional scale. The land cover distribution observed in Italy in 1960, 1990, and 2006 was compared with trends in annual precipitation and the aridity index estimated during 1951–2007. Annual rainfall decreased by 0.41% per year during the examined period with the consequent increase in the aridity index (0.48% per year). Both rainfall decrease and aridity increase followed a non-uniform spatial distribution impacting differently the Mediterranean landscape mosaic.