Urban regions are important places of ecosystem service demands and, at the same time, are the primary source of global environmental impacts. Although there is broad agreement on the importance of incorporating the concept of ecosystem services into policy strategies and decision-making, the lack of a standardized approach to quantifying ecosystem services at the landscape scale has hindered progress in this direction. Moreover, tradeoffs between ecosystem services and the supply/demand ratio of ecosystem services in urban landscapes have rarely been investigated.

The increase of global urbanization can have effects on wildlife species, including carnivores such as coyotes (Canis latrans). As coyotes continue to settle in more urban areas, reports of human-coyote conflicts, such as attacks on humans or pets, may also increase. Understanding environmental variables that might influence whether or not coyotes and human-coyote conflicts will occur in certain urban areas may assist wildlife officials in creating management plans for urban wildlife.

Three quarters of the global human population will live in coastal areas in the coming decades and will continue to develop these areas as population density increases. Anthropogenic stressors from this coastal development may lead to fragmented habitats, altered food webs, changes in sediment characteristics, and loss of near-shore vegetated habitats. Seagrass systems are important vegetated estuarine habitats that are vulnerable to anthropogenic stressors, but provide valuable ecosystem functions.

Spatial indices measure the geometric arrangement of land use and land cover classes at various scales and are computationally adaptive with wavelet transform coefficients. Decision rules built on permutations of three spatial indices – energy, log energy and Shannon's diversity – are used to improve the accuracy of multi-resolution hierarchical wavelet-based classifications. Comparisons are made with classification results derived from other texture measures, as well as with classification results calculated from more conventional per-pixel techniques.

Many environmental patterns that may have profound effects on wildlife communities occur at the landscape scale, e.g. habitat fragmentation, human demography and distribution of various resources. In order to understand how alterations of such patterns could influence e.g. wildlife species occurrences and community composition, it is important to first study these relationships empirically and at the appropriate scale. We surveyed the wildlife community in a boreal ecosystem in central Sweden using pellet group counts, while walking ‘‘wildlife triangles’’.

The ground reference data obtained to assess map accuracy can be simultaneously used to estimate area (extent). This dual-purpose use of ground reference data is examined for the special case of a two-class map of ‘change’ and ‘no change’. To assess the accuracy of a change map, stratified sampling is often implemented with a disproportionately larger sample size allocated to the map change stratum. But this allocation targeting user's accuracy of change is not necessarily effective for the competing objective of estimating the area of change.

Irrigation along the Nile River has resulted in dramatic changes in the biophysical environment of Upper Egypt. In this study we used a combination of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 250 m Normalized Difference Vegetation Index data and Landsat imagery to identify areas that changed from 2001 to 2008 as a result of irrigation and water-level fluctuations in the Nile River and nearby waterbodies.

The method of surface modeling of land cover scenarios (SMLCS) has been improved to simulate the scenarios of land cover in the karst areas of southwestern China. On the basis of the observation monthly climatic data collected from 782 weather stations of China during the period from 1981 to 2010, the climatic scenarios data of RCP26, RCP45 and RCP85 scenarios released by CMIP5, and the land cover current data of China in 2010, the land cover scenarios of southwestern China were respectively simulated. The average total accuracy and Kappa index of SMLCS are 90.25 and 87.96 %, respectively.

On 8 October 2005, a devastating earthquake struck northern Pakistan and several parts of Pakistani- and Indian-controlled Kashmir. The severely hit areas lie in close proximity to the most tectonically active region of the western Himalayas. The earthquake destroyed close to 400 000 houses and over 75 000 people lost their lives. The intensity of the earthquake was such that it triggered widespread landslides, which caused considerable destruction of the area's forests, and blocked the mountain roads and rivers.

The conversion of native habitats to pasture and other working lands, unbuilt lands modified by humans for production, is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. While some human-dominated landscapes on continents support relatively high native biodiversity, this capacity is little studied in oceanic island systems characterized by high endemism and vulnerability to invasion.

Monitoring land cover over large areas on a yearly basis is challenging. The spatial and temporal consistency of an object-based change detection algorithm was tested through a multi-year application on the forest of Borneo, using SPOT-VEGETATION time series from 2000 to 2008. Continuous change thresholds allowed the tuning of the algorithm according to specific requirements in terms of omission and commission errors.

Land cover is considered to have significant influence on the hydrologic response of a river basin. In this study, we assessed how changes in land cover over time affected flood behaviour from 1988 to 2005, in the Upper Ping River Basin, northern Thailand. We correlated the types of land cover with rainfall–runoff behaviour for smaller and larger flood events taking place during this period. To quantify land cover, nine Landsat 5 TM images taken during the dry season (January or February) were obtained and processed to examine inter-annual land cover changes.