Mapping urban expansion and impervious surfaces (IS) has become a useful tool for supporting watershed assessments. The lack of large-area time-series maps created the need to develop an approach and products that can easily be scaled. In this research application, 81 Landsat 1, 2, and 5 scenes for the epochs of 1975, 1985, and 1996 were used to map urban land use/land cover across New England, USA.

Over the past few decades, energy and water fluxes have been directly measured by a global flux network, which was established by regional and continental network sites based on an eddy covariance (EC) method. Although, the EC method possesses many advantages, its typical data coverage could not exceed 65 % due to various environmental factors including micrometeorological conditions and systematic malfunctions. In this study, four different methodologies were used to fill the gap in latent heat flux (LE) data.

Biodiversity has been recognized as one of the key components of environmental sustainability. Assessment of biodiversity trends and progress toward targets requires effective and sound indicators. In our article, we review and compare the leading multispecies biodiversity indices used in global and regional assessments. We reviewed basic characteristics of these aggregated and composite biodiversity indicators and evaluated them with regard to their ecological performance, policy relevance and other accounting aspects.

In order to choose adequate conservation strategies to face the deterioration of natural ecosystems and the decline of species, it is essential to know the spatial distribution of diversity. Here, we use predictive modelling in spiders, which is a group of highly diverse generalist predators that show a great potential as diversity indicators. We built a predictive model of spider species richness within a protected area assessing those environmental factors that have the strongest effect in the distribution of spider species richness.

One of the prerequisites of the REDD+ mechanism is to effectively predict business-as-usual (BAU) scenarios for change in forest cover. This would enable estimation of how much carbon emission a project could potentially prevent and thus how much carbon credit should be rewarded. However, different factors like forest degradation and the lack of linearity in forest cover transitions challenge the accuracy of such scenarios. Here we predict and validate such BAU scenarios retrospectively based on forest cover changes at village and district level in North Central Vietnam.

Capsule Diet composition differed significantly between winter cereals, winter oil-seed rape, stubble fields and permanent fallows.Aims To determine the composition of the diet of Grey Partridges in autumn and winter in four agricultural land-cover types, characteristic of lowland areas of Central Europe.Methods Faecal analysis was used to determine diet.

This study developed three scenarios of future land use/land cover on a local level for the Kyung-An River Basin and its vicinity in South Korea at a 30-m resolution based on the two scenario families of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report Emissions Scenarios (SRES): A2 and B1, as well as a business-as-usual scenario. The IPCC SRES A2 and B1 were used to define future local development patterns and associated land use change.

Urban greenery is a favoured approach applied towards reducing urban warmth and climate discomfort, but ascertaining its measured and perceived effectiveness in tropical climates is relatively understudied. To this end, we investigated microclimate differences within an urban park (the Singapore Botanic Gardens) to assess if variations in plot-scale land cover affect both objective (measured) and subjective (surveyed) microclimate data.

The Sanaga River is one of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest and greatly regulated rivers. Available flow data for this hydrosystem largely cover the pre- and post-regulation periods. From comparisons between unregulated (hypothetical) and observed scenarios, it has been possible to separate and to quantify hydro-climatic (groundwater + rainfall) change effects from anthropogenic impacts (especially dam-related alterations).

In past decades, the Iberian Peninsula has been shown to have suffered vegetation changes such as desertification and reforestation. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST) parameters, estimated from data acquired by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite series, are particularly adapted to assess these changes.

An objective and reliable assessment of wildlife movement is important in theoretical and applied ecology. The identification and mapping of landscape elements that may enhance functional connectivity is usually a subjective process based on visual interpretations of species movement patterns. New methods based on mathematical morphology provide a generic, flexible, and automated approach for the definition of indicators based on the classification and mapping of spatial patterns of connectivity from observed or simulated movement and dispersal events.

Razaksat, a high-resolution Malaysian remote-sensing satellite, was launched on 14 July 2009. It carries a medium-sized aperture camera (MAC) with one panchromatic and four multispectral bands, of 2.5 and 5 m spatial resolution, respectively. The satellite was placed in a near-equatorial orbit with a low inclination angle of 9° to enable an optimum 14 overpasses per day over the equatorial region (i.e. 9° N to 9° S) as compared to only three daily passes over Malaysia for near-polar orbiting satellites.