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Issuesland coverLandLibrary Resource
There are 2, 240 content items of different types and languages related to land cover on the Land Portal.
Displaying 1789 - 1800 of 2218

indicator framework for the climatic adaptive capacity of natural ecosystems

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2011
Hungary

Questions: Can the climatic adaptive capacity of natural ecosystems be estimated with using landscape indicators based on vegetation or land-cover data? Can species distribution model (SDM) outputs be enhanced using such indicators? What are the data requirements and optimal parameter values of potential indicators? Location: Indicator framework: unspecified. Case study: Kiskunság, Hungary. Methods: (1) We define a general framework for handling adaptation in ecological climate change impact assessments based on IPCC definitions.

Recovery of saturated hydraulic conductivity under secondary succession on former pasture in the humid tropics

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2011
Panama

Landscapes in the humid tropics are undergoing a continuous change in land use. Deforestation is still taking its toll on forested areas, but at the same time more and more secondary forests emerge where formerly agricultural lands and pastures are being abandoned. Regarding soil hydrology, the extent to which secondary succession can recover soil hydrological properties disturbed by antecedent deforestation and pasture use is yet poorly understood.

Determining habitat suitability for bumblebees in a mountain system: a baseline approach for testing the impact of climate change on the occurrence and abundance of species

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2014
Europe

AIM: Our aim was to determine the role of environmental variables in explaining occurrence and abundance patterns of bumblebee (Bombus) species in a mountain region. We also used a historical dataset to compare historical and recent habitat suitability predictions for forecasting variations in species' responses to regional climate warming. LOCATION: The Cantabrian Range (Iberian Peninsula, south‐western Europe).

Can biodiversity monitoring schemes provide indicators for ecosystem services?

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2013
Sweden

Recently, the science and policy agenda on biodiversity moved to include ecosystem services assessments and it is recognised that for determining the effectiveness and progress of policy frameworks monitoring is crucial. Within European monitoring schemes, data is collected following different sampling protocols for a range of biodiversity or context related aspects; from EU-wide general land cover mapping to red list species within Annex I habitats.

Potential impacts of climate change on distribution range of Nabis pseudoferus and N. palifer (Hemiptera: Nabidae) in Iran

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2014
Iran

Nabis pseudoferus Remane and N. palifer Seidenstucker are predators that feed on a wide range of insect pests. To reveal their current potential habitats, the effects of climate change and their future distribution in various areas of Iran we used maximum entropy modeling (Maxent). To produce the models, samples were collected from 218 areas of Iran resulting in discovering 271 points where the nabids were found. The accuracy and performance of distribution models were also evaluated by the area under receiver operating characteristic curve and jack‐knife analysis.

national approach for mapping and quantifying habitat-based biodiversity metrics across multiple spatial scales

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2013
United States of America

Ecosystem services, i.e., services provided to humans from ecological systems have become a key issue of this century in resource management, conservation planning, and environmental decision analysis. Mapping and quantifying ecosystem services have become strategic national interests for integrating ecology with economics to help understand the effects of human policies and actions and their subsequent impacts on both ecosystem function and human well-being.

Changes and interactions between forest landscape connectivity and burnt area in Spain

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2013
Spain

The spatial structure, functionality and dynamics of forest landscapes in peninsular Spain and the Balearic Islands were compared over the last five decades. Two particular features were studied in the sample sites: forest connectivity for wildlife and areas burnt by wildfires. 191 Squares, each 4km×4km, were selected from the SISPARES (the monitoring framework designed to evaluate the trends in the structure of Spanish rural landscapes) environmental strata.

Habitat suitability modelling for species at risk is sensitive to algorithm and scale: A case study of Blanding's turtle, Emydoidea blandingii, in Ontario, Canada

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2012
Canada

Species distribution modelling (SDM) can help conservation by providing information on the ecological requirements of species at risk. We developed habitat suitability models at multiple spatial scales for a threatened freshwater turtle, Emydoidea blandingii, in Ontario as a case study. We also explored the effect of background data selection and modelling algorithm selection on habitat suitability predictions. We used sighting records, high-resolution land cover data (25m), and two SDM techniques: boosted regression trees; and maximum entropy modelling.

Landscape metrics as indicators of the structural landscape changes – two case studies from the Czech Republic after 1948

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2012
Czech Republic

The composition and configuration of landscape elements as well as their size and shape co-determine the character of the flows and processes in the landscape. Using remote sensing data and landscape metrics, this article sets out to analyse changes in the landscape structure at two different spatial scales, focusing on two study areas in the Czech Republic in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Characterizing temporal vegetation dynamics of land use in regional scale of Java Island, Indonesia

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2013
Indonesia

Improving the understanding of land use and land cover is a major research challenge for the human-environmental sciences and is essential for many aspects of global environmental research. Considering seasonal vegetation dynamics or phenological dynamics in multi-year series leads to a broader view of land use and land cover. This study is based on the hypothesis that a pixel representing a complex but consistent land use has a typical, distinct and repeated temporal pattern of vegetation index inter-annually, which can be used as characteristic signatures for land use classification.

Environmental Risk Assessment of Dams by Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods: A Case Study of the Polrood Dam, Guilan Province, Iran

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2014
Iran

A dam's construction always imposes some risks to the environment. In this article, the environmental risks of the Polrood dam, located in a northern province of Iran, during its construction phase, were identified, ranked, and evaluated. The risk factors were initially identified by Delphi questionnaire and then rated using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Subsequently, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to classify the risk factors into four major categories, and Expert Choice software was used to weight them.

Spatiotemporal characterization of land surface temperature in Mount Kilimanjaro using satellite data

Journal Articles & Books
December, 2014

Mount Kilimanjaro is considered the highest free-standing mountain in the world and a symbol of the African continent. Steep slopes and high altitudes are on the backdrop of unique biophysical characteristics, in which changes between savannas, tropical cloud forests, and subalpine vegetation can be observed in relatively small distances. In the context of this complex and heterogeneous landscape, describing the interactions between climatic variables and ecosystem functions is crucial for understanding the drivers of biodiversity.