AIM: The brown‐headed cowbird is an obligate brood parasite known to exploit a large number of host species and use a variety of habitats. Much attention has been directed towards uncovering the fundamental factors that affect cowbird abundance; however, no study has evaluated these factors in the context of a biogeographic‐scale analysis that takes into account spatial autocorrelation. Our primary objective was to compare the relative influence of geography, land cover and host species on the local abundance of cowbirds. LOCATION: Great Plains region of the USA.

While it is clear that many migratory behaviors are shared across taxa, generalizable models that predict the distribution and abundance of migrating taxa at the landscape scale are rare. In migratory landbirds, ephemeral concentrations of refueling birds indicate that individual behaviors sometimes produce large epiphenomena in particular geographic locations. Identifying landscape factors that predict the distribution and abundance of birds during migratory stopover will both improve our understanding of the migratory process and assist in broad, regionally relevant conservation.

- Environmental factors act in a hierarchical manner at multiple spatial scales to influence the organisation of ecological assemblages; however, the relative influence of the different scale-related factor groups is poorly known. We evaluated the importance of catchment-scale and site-scale environmental variables, as well as the spatial context of the sampling sites, in shaping stream fish assemblages in an agriculture-dominated landscape in Hungary.

Contemporary land-use change and impacts on natural systems are of concern throughout the Cornbelt region, where agricultural activities have extensively altered the landscape. Land-use changes driven by urbanization throughout this region could have a disproportionate impact on remaining natural areas, particularly forests. We used readily available data sets and software to assess land cover change for four municipalities in Iowa and to examine the usefulness of this approach for urban foresters and planners interested in understanding/predicting impacts of land cover change.

Models to predict species’ ranges have chiefly been limited to abiotic variables. However, the full ecological niche depends on a myriad of factors, both biotic and abiotic, that often correspond to completely different data types. We applied a methodology based on data mining techniques to construct ecological niche models composed of biotic as well as abiotic variables using three quite different sets of variables: climatic layers, maps of land cover and point collections of Mexican mammals.

In scope of an IWRM concept for the Federal District, Western Central Brazil we developed a planning support tool, which enables non-experts to test the effects of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) on landscape processes and landscape functions (LPF) related to sediment generation and retention. For this purpose we developed the web-based tool Letsmap do Brasil. The tool has two principal layers. The upper layer contains information on land use and its effect on LPF, i.e. sediment retention, runoff control, nitrogen loss control and agronomic value.

It is important to identify nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from non-point sources (NPS) to protect watershed water quality. However, few studies have been conducted in a large basin to determine the sources and causal factors of N and P from multiple land use and soil types. In this study, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied in support of the Small-scale Watershed Extended Method (SWEM) in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region (TGRR), China. The first-order error analysis (FOEA) was used to identify the key sub-processes that affected the occurrence of NPS pollution.

Human land use contributes significantly to the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in land management practices have been proposed as a critical and cost-effective mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the storage of additional carbon in vegetation and soils. However many discussions of the potential for land use to mitigate climate change only take into account biophysical factors such as vegetation and land cover and neglect how the agency of land owners themselves affects whether additional carbon storage can be achieved.

Super resolution mapping is a continuously growing area of remote sensing. Satellite images coupled with a very high spectral resolution, and are suitable for detection and classification of surfaces and different elements in the observed image. The main problem with high resolution data for these applications is the (relatively) low spatial resolution, which can vary from a few to tens of meters.

Climate change in the Mediterranean is expected to lead to lower total rainfall and soil moisture, together with higher storm intensities; different vegetation types are expected to react positively or negatively to these and other changes. Climate change could therefore have positive or negative impacts on runoff and soil erosion during storms, and previous research has indicated that the impacts could be different at the field, hillslope and catchment scales.

Irregular shape of terrain causes variable illumination angles and diverse reflectance values within same land cover type in optical remote sensing image. It causes problems in image segmentation and misclassification (snow with other land cover). This perception leads to develop an empirical-statistical based topographic correction (ESbTC) algorithm for reflectance modeling after compared with existed topographic correction methods like Cosine correction, C-correction, Minnaert correction, sun–canopy–senor with c-correction (SCS + C) and slope matching, in the context of snow reflectance.

A large wetland drainage project was initiated in 1912 near the town of Seney, Michigan, U.S.A. This project included the construction of a series of ditches through a large peatland to drain the land for agricultural use. The largest of these ditches was the 35 km long Walsh Ditch. Much of the drained wetland affected by the Walsh Ditch is now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of Seney National Wildlife Refuge.