This study uses the Holocene lake sediment of Lake Ķūži (Latvia, Vidzeme Heights) for environmental reconstruction with multi-proxy records including lithology, computerised axial tomography scan, grain-size analysis, geochemistry, diatoms and macrofossils, supported by AMS radiocarbon dating. Numerical analyses (PCA; CONISS) reveal three main phases in the development of the lake. Response to the Lateglacial–Holocene transition in Lake Ķūži took place around 11,300 cal. BP.

Provision of clean freshwater is an essential ecosystem service that is under increasing pressure worldwide from a variety of conflicting demands. Water yields differ in relation to land‐cover type. Successful resource management therefore requires accurate information on yields from alternative vegetation types to adequately address concerns regarding water production. Of particular importance are upper watersheds/catchments, regardless of where water is extracted.

Temporarily open/closed estuaries in South Africa are being subjected to varying degrees of catchment land-cover transformation. Natural landscapes and hydrological functions are integral to the functioning of estuaries. The relationship between catchment land-cover and the health of the East Kleinemonde Estuary was investigated between 2011 and 2013, using geographic information system (GIS) techniques to delineate and quantify land-cover in the whole catchment, in the lower section of the catchment, and in the 1 km and 100 m buffer zones surrounding the estuary.

Ecosystem services to agriculture, such as pollination, rely on natural areas adjacent to farmland to support organisms that provide services. Native insect pollinators depend on natural or semi‐natural land surrounding farms for nesting and alternative foraging resources. Despite interest in conserving pollinators through habitat restoration, the scale at which land use affects pollinators and thus crop pollination services is not well understood. We measured abundance of native, wild bee pollinators and the pollination services they provided to highbush blueberry Vaccinium corymbosum L.

Low or medium spatial resolution satellite images are used for environmental monitoring in remote, extremely cold areas such as Antarctica. However, they cannot provide detailed spatial and spectral information over Antarctic areas. For obtaining this information, we propose an Antarctic land-cover classification method using IKONOS and Hyperion data over Terra Nova Bay, Antarctica. High spatial resolution IKONOS imagery enabled the detection of detailed, accurate boundaries between areas of snow, ice, vegetation, water and rock.

The long-term record of global Landsat data is an important resource for studying Earth's system. Given the identified gaps in Landsat data and the undetermined future status of Landsat data availability, alternatives to Landsat imagery need to be tested in an operational environment. In this study, forest land cover and crown closure maps generated from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) and System Pour 1'Observation de la Terre (SPOT) data were compared to Landsat-based map products currently in use by the grizzly bear habitat-mapping program.

There is a growing demand for improving the measurement of forest resources, with more frequent updating and better information on environmental variables. We explore the cost efficiency of a stratified two-stage design using area sampling to estimate the forest plantation and native forest areas in southern Chile. Analytical expressions for the approximate mean square error of combined and separate ratio estimators are derived applying Taylor linearization.

A total of 458 in situ hyperspectral data were collected from 13 urban tree species in the City of Tampa, FL, USA using a spectrometer. The 13 species include 11 broadleaf and two conifer species. Three different techniques, segmented canonical discriminant analysis (CDA), segmented principal component analysis (PCA) and segmented stepwise discriminate analysis (SDA), were applied and compared for dimension reduction and feature extraction.

The impact of land-cover types on soil erosion and runoff, as well as on physico-chemical soil properties, was monitored. The study area, an agroforestry landscape was located in Sierra Nevada Mountains in south-eastern Spain. Eight land-cover types were investigated: farmland planted with olive, almond, and cereals; forest with P. halepensis and P. sylvestris; shrubland; grassland; and abandoned farmland. The erosion plots replicated twice were located on hillslopes, where erosion and runoff were measured after 22 storm events.

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) contains crop and other specific land cover classifications obtained using remote sensing for the conterminous United States. This raster-formatted and geo-referenced product has been widely used in such applications as disaster assessments, land cover and land use research, agricultural sustainability studies, and agricultural production decision-making. The traditional CDL data distribution channels include paper thematic maps, email data requests, CD/DVD media, and ftp bulk downloading.

The assessment of cultural ecosystem services, in our case landscape aesthetics, is the most commonly investigated but least formalized issue in the scope of the ecosystem services concept. In contrast to ecological or economic aspects, the assessment of aesthetics cannot easily be based on quantitative information. Therefore, two different methodological approaches that assess landscape aesthetics either from an objective or a subjective point of view have been established in the past. This article presents in its first part an objective, landscape metrics-based assessment approach.

A numerical research is carried out to investigate the regional impact of extreme wind-induced dust transport in the central-northern part of Mexico. In boreal winter, strong wind soil erosion processes occur in the arid zones of the Mexican highlands, as a consequence of land use change and land cover change. The effect of land use change and land cover change has consequences in the atmospheric circulation, by altering the balance in solar radiation, albedo, soil moisture and texture, aerodynamic roughness and other surface properties.