land cover

Coastal shorelines are naturally dynamic, shifting in response to coastal geomorphological processes. Globally, land use change associated with coastal urban development and growing human population pressures is accelerating coastal shoreline change. In southern Vietnam, coastal erosion currently is posing considerable risks to shoreline land use and coastal inhabitants.

Historic land‐cover/use change is important for studies on climate change, soil carbon, and biodiversity assessments. Available reconstructions focus on the net area difference between two time steps (net changes) instead of accounting for all area gains and losses (gross changes).

Maps of continental‐scale land cover are utilized by a range of diverse users but whilst a range of products exist that describe present and recent land cover in Europe, there are currently no datasets that describe past variations over long time‐scales.

AIM: Deterministic niche theory predicts that increasing environmental heterogeneity increases species richness.

CONTEXT: Understanding the causes and consequences of land use and land cover change in drylands is crucial for global sustainability. Inner Mongolia consists of arid and semiarid ecosystems of global importance.

EU conservation policy is primarily based on the Natura 2000 network of protected areas (PAs). We analyzed the land-cover changes between 2000 and 2006 inside 25,703 Natura 2000 sites in 24 EU Member States, and compared them with those observed outside the PAs. At the EU level, ‘Artificial surfaces’ and ‘Agricultural areas’ exhibit lower rates of transformation within PAs than outside.

The semiarid Chinese Loess Plateau is notorious for severe drought, water erosion, and environmental degradation. Changes in landscape patterns and rainfall are key drivers that determine the dynamics of runoff loss and sediment yield from catchments. These factors have crucial implications for management of other fragile ecosystems around the globe.

QUESTION: Increasing population pressure, socio‐economic development and associated natural resource use in savannas are resulting in large‐scale land cover changes, which can be mapped using remote sensing.

Whether grazed semi-arid grassland can be regarded as a net-sink or net-source of aeolian dust is difficult to detect since deposition and emission processes are in gradual transition. In grassland, dust arrives from sources far away or is directly emitted and immediately part of the suspension load.

Farming practices are rarely considered in the description of agricultural landscapes. However, the variety of cropping systems creates a particular kind of heterogeneity which can strongly affect the diversity of species living in agro-ecosystems, and consequently the ecosystem services they provide.

The black-and-white snub-nosed monkey Rhinopithecus bieti is endemic to China, where its population is fragmented into 15 isolated groups and threatened despite efforts to protect the species. Here we analyse possible habitat connectivity between the groups reported in Yunnan, using genetic, least-cost path and Euclidean distances.

Fragmentation of forest landscapes and structural degradation of woodlands have a holistic negative effect on biodiversity. Bats are considered as indicators of woodland’s structural quality. However, as bats commute long distances on a nightly basis, their diversity should also be limited by large-scale drivers such as landscape and species availability in the region.