A rapid assessment survey on the occurrence and distribution of protosteloid amoebae was carried out in central Kenya. Samples of dead plant materials were collected from 46 study sites (each 20 x 20 m) situated along an elevation gradient (1,785-3,396 m) that encompassed five major land use/cover types. Twenty-four species and subspecific taxa were recovered and included 23 protostelids and one minute myxomycete, often included in surveys for protostelids. All of these were the first records for Kenya, and six were new for Africa.

Community assembly rules have been extensively studied, but its association with regional environmental variation and land use history remains largely unexplored. Land use history might be especially important in Mediterranean forests, considering their historical deforestation and recent afforestation.

Understanding how land use and land cover change influences the flow and water quality of rivers is critically important for river management and restoration. Human activities have transformed the landscapes in southern China where damaged river systems need to be restored and better managed for achieving environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we quantified the land use and land cover pattern of the Dongjiang River watershed, China between 1990 and 2006 based on remote sensing data and field measurements.

Understanding the intimate dynamics of urban–wildland interfaces in Mediterranean landscapes is particularly challenging because of multiple biophysical factors (dry or arid climate, low-quality soils, poor vegetation cover) determining an increased environmental sensitivity to human pressure. Although dense and compact cities were sprawling rapidly in the most recent decades, many suburban areas in southern Europe still preserve biodiversity-rich habitats, traditional crop mosaics and high-quality relict forest stands.

Land cover classifications of coarse-resolution data can aid the identification and quantification of natural variability and anthropogenic change at regional scales, but true landscape change can be distorted by misrepresentation of map classes. The Lerma–Chapala–Santiago (LCS) is biophysically diverse and heavily modified by urbanization and agricultural expansion.

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.

Widespread land use changes, and ensuing effects on ecosystem services, are expected from expanding bioenergy production. Although most U.S. production of ethanol is from corn, it is envisaged that future ethanol production will also draw from cellulosic sources such as perennial grasses.

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.