Population viability analyses provide a quantitative approach that seeks to predict the possible future status of a species of interest under different scenarios and, therefore, can be important components of large-scale species’ conservation programs. We created a model and simulated range-wide population and breeding habitat dynamics for an endangered woodland warbler, the golden-cheeked warbler (Setophaga chrysoparia). Habitat-transition probabilities were estimated across the warbler's breeding range by combining National Land Cover Database imagery with multistate modeling.

This study utilizes for the first time integrated knowledge-driven and data-driven methods for groundwater potential zoning in the hard-rock terrain of Ahar River catchment, Rajasthan, India by employing remote sensing, geographical information system, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), and multiple linear regression (MLR) techniques.

Identifying the patterns of land cover change (LCC) and their main proximate causes and underlying driving forces in tropical rainforests is an urgent task for designing adequate management and conservation policies. The Lachuá region maintains the largest lowland rainforest remnant in Guatemala, but it has been highly deforested and fragmented during the last decades. This is the first paper to describe the patterns of LCC and the associated political and socioeconomic factors in the region over the last 50� years.

The area of land occupied by exurban residential development is significant and has been increasing over the past several decades in the United States. Considerable attention has been drawn to the measurement of regional-scale patterns of land-cover change and assessment of its environmental and socioeconomic consequences. Yet little is known about the quantity of land-cover change within individual exurban residential parcels, which reflect homeowner preferences, land-management strategies, and the ecosystem services they generate.

Shanghai is physically and socio-economically vulnerable to accelerated sea level rise because of its low elevation, flat topography, highly developed economy and highly-dense population. In this paper, two scenarios of sea level rise and storm surge flooding along the Shanghai coast are presented by forecasting 24 (year 2030) and 44 (year 2050) years into the future and are applied to a digital elevation model to illustrate the extent to which coastal areas are susceptible to levee breach and overtopping using previously developed inflow calculating and flood routing models.

A simple, efficient, and practical approach for detecting cloud and shadow areas in satellite imagery and restoring them with clean pixel values has been developed. Cloud and shadow areas are detected using spectral information from the blue, shortwave infrared, and thermal infrared bands of Landsat Thematic Mapper or Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus imagery from two dates (a target image and a reference image).

Identification of suitable site for urban development in hilly areas is one of the critical issues of planning. Site suitability analysis has become inevitable for delineating appropriate site for various developmental initiatives, especially in the undulating terrain of the hills. The study illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) and multicriteria evaluation (MCE) technique for selection of suitable sites for urban development in Mussoorie municipal area, Dehradun district, Uttarakhand.

Land cover change monitoring is important for climate and environmental research. An automated approach for updating land cover maps derived from Landsat-like data is urgently needed to process large amounts of data. Change detection is an important part of the updating approach; however, pseudo-changes commonly occur because satellite images acquired in different seasons can capture phenological differences.

Marginal land use changes can abruptly result in non-marginal and irreversible changes in ecosystem functioning and the economic values that the ecosystem generates. This challenges the traditional ecosystem services (ESS) mapping approach, which has often made the assumption that ESS can be mapped uniquely to land use and land cover data. Using a functional fragmentation measure, we show how landscape pattern changes might lead to changes in the delivery of ESS.

Human-induced land cover changes are causing important effects on the ecological services rendered by mountain ecosystems, and the number of case-studies of the impact of humans on soil erosion and sediment yield has mounted rapidly. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that allows evaluating overall changes in erosion regulation after human disturbances. The basic idea behind this model is that soil erosion mechanisms are independent of human impact, but that the frequency–magnitude distributions of erosion rates change as a response to human disturbances.

We examined macroinvertebrate community data from Missouri reference streams collected approximately 12 years apart to evaluate whether substantial changes in community metrics and/or taxonomic composition occurred over that period. We used analysis of variance to test whether metrics differed between years or between other variables and used non-metric multidimensional scaling to examine compositional differences among samples and the environmental variables that were most associated with these differences.

CONTEXT: Landscape transition drives environmental change across the globe. However, landscape and its change are complex with high spatial heterogeneity, which challenges strategic decision-making. OBJECTIVES: This paper aims to derive management meaningful units based on landscape status and change analysis and the generalization of landscape spatial heterogeneity. METHODS: Based on contrasting cases from Finland (Vanajavesi) and China (Baota District), this paper analyzed the landscape attributes and change since 2000.