Understanding the rates and causes of land-use change is crucial in identifying solutions, especially in sensitive landscapes and ecosystems, as well as in places undergoing rapid political, socioeconomic or ecological change. Despite considerable concern at the rate of transformation and degradation of the biodiversity-rich Albany Thicket biome in South Africa, most knowledge is gleaned from private commercial lands and state conservation areas.

Integrated transportation and land use studies are of major interest to planners because they consider the interaction between transportation development and land use change. Quantifying the impact of transport infrastructure on land use change is necessary for evaluating the role of transportation development in the process of land use and land cover change in the urban-rural fringe.

We present the first comprehensive multi-temporal analysis of land-cover change for California across its major ecological regions and primary land-cover types. Recently completed satellite-based estimates of land-cover and land-use change information for large portions of the United States allow for consistent measurement and comparison across heterogeneous landscapes. Landsat data were employed within a pure-panel stratified one-stage cluster sample to estimate and characterize land-cover change for 1973-2000.

Migration and population growth lead in coastal zones, especially in developing countries like Benin in Western Africa, to extreme land use pressure, causing ecological as well as land cover and land use changes, socio-economic modifications, and conflicts of interest and generational conflicts. To detect those fast-moving processes area-wide remains almost impossible in developing countries due to the lack of official statistics, often restricted remote sensing data, and limited financial resources.

Remote-sensing data for protected areas in northern Togo, obtained in three different years (2007, 2000, and 1987), were used to assess and map changes in land cover and land use for this drought prone zone. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was applied to the images to map changes in vegetation. An unsupervised classification, followed by classes recoding, filtering, identifications, area computing and post-classification process were applied to the composite of the three years of NDVI images.

An understanding of changes in Amazonian landscapes depends on documentation about alterations in land cover. This article highlights the efforts of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA) related to the topic. In particular, a longitudinal study has analyzed the social and biophysical dimensions of land use/land cover, using a multi-scalar georeferenced approach. The study areas represent a gradient of soil fertility in Amazônia and include distinct landscape mosaics, from the Amazon estuary and the Bragantina region to northeastern Rondônia.

Land degradation and global warming are currently highly active research topics. Land degradation can both change land cover and surface climate and significantly influence atmospheric circulation. Researches have verified that carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) are major greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere and are directly affected by human activity. However, to date, there is no research on the spatial distribution of GHG concentrations and also no research on how land degradations affect GHG concentrations in arid and semi-arid regions.

Soil and water conservation measures including terracing, afforestation, construction of sediment‐trapping dams, and the ‘Grain for Green Program’ have been extensively implemented in the Yanhe River watershed, of the Loess Plateau, China, over the last six decades, and have resulted in large‐scale land use and land cover changes. This study examined the trends and shifts in streamflow regime over the period of 1953–2010 and relates them to changes in land use and soil and water conservation and to the climatic factors of precipitation and air temperature.

Reinterpretation of vegetation and climatic conditions of Anatolia and neighboring regions during Last Glacial (30–15 cal ka BP) have been done using a non-quantitative biomization approach based on previously published plant functional types. The results suggest that the climate was cold and humid before ∼25 cal ka BP and also during the period ∼23–19 cal ka BP (except East Anatolia). Forest vegetation was 80–90% of the land cover in the northwestern Anatolia and Black Sea coast, and 50–60% along the Mediterranean coast at the same period.

Non‐native, invasive grasses have been linked to altered grass‐fire cycles worldwide. Although a few studies have quantified resulting changes in fire activity at local scales, and many have speculated about larger scales, regional alterations to fire regimes remain poorly documented. We assessed the influence of large‐scale Bromus tectorum (hereafter cheatgrass) invasion on fire size, duration, spread rate, and interannual variability in comparison to other prominent land cover classes across the Great Basin, USA.

BACKGROUND: South America is one of the most species diverse continents in the world. Within South America diversity is not distributed evenly at both local and continental scales and this has led to the recognition of various areas with unique species assemblages. Several schemes currently exist which divide the continental-level diversity into large species assemblages referred to as biomes.

This paper investigates the interplay of the catchment geomorphology, hydrology and soil properties on the development of waterlogging and land degradation within different dry land catchments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Multi-temporal remote sensing data of the Landsat Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper were collected and processed to detect the land cover changes and development of cultivations within the two areas.