urbanização

The Mediterranean region covers about 854 million ha, but only 118 million (or 14 per cent) are suitable for agricultural production. In North Africa and the Middle East (MENA), agricultural land covers about 5 per cent; in Egypt and Algeria, it occupies less than 4 per cent and, in Libya, less than 2 per cent of the total national land area.

In pace with rapid urbanization, urban areas in many countries are undergoing huge changes. The large spectral variance and spatial heterogeneity within the ‘buildings’ land cover class, as well as the similar spectral properties between buildings and other urban structures, make building change detection a challenging problem.

Rapid urbanization together with policy ineffectiveness in controlling urban growth is often associated to soil and land degradation in both the developing and developed world.

Global land use structure is changing rapidly due to unceasing population growth and accelerated urbanization, which leads to fierce competition between the rigid demand for built-up area and the protection of cultivated land, forest, and grassland. It has been a great challenge to realize the sustainable development of land resources.

Heterogeneous land cover patterns contribute to unique ecological conditions in cities and little is known about the drivers of these patterns among cities.

This study compared concentrations and export of total phosphorus (TP; including dissolved and particulate forms) and nitrogen (N) between quickflow and delayed flow at two adjacent agricultural catchments (Jennings and McLarens Creeks), one of which is undergoing increased urbanization.

Chongqing Municipality, located on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, is one of China’s four largest megacities, comparable with Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. In recent years, Chongqing and its surroundings have been experiencing severe environmental problems, such as urbanization, pollution, and deforestation, due to the rapid economic development of China’s inland region.

The assessment of freshwater resources in a drainage basin is not only dependent on its hydrologic parameters but also on the socio-economic system driving development in the watershed area; the socio-economic aspect, that is often neglected in hydrologic studies, is one of the novelties of this study.

In many cities worldwide, urbanization is leading to the rapid and extensive fragmentation of native vegetation into small and scattered urban remnants. We investigated the effects of fragmentation on plant species richness and abundance in 30 remnant Banksia woodlands in the rapidly expanding city of Perth, located in the southwestern Australian global biodiversity hotspot.

Studies of urbanization effects in Chinese cities from the aspect of the coupled development of economy and environment are rare due to data limitations. This paper studied Shanghai’s fast urban expansion and examined the dynamic relationship between economic growth and environment consequences at the district level.

The role of vegetation analysis by remote sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) technology to support plans for sustainable development is discussed through a proposal of an index of ecosystem “integrity” or of regeneration capacity. The index is based on the vegetation “mass” of a given land cover type and the capacity that such mass has to contrast soil erosion.

Dense multi-temporal stacks of Landsat imagery have most commonly been exploited to identify land cover and land use changes (LCLUC) based on detection of abrupt changes in continuous value spectral indices.