Global climate models (GCM) investigating the effects of land cover on climate have found that replacing extra-tropical forest with cropland promotes cooling. We compared cropland and forest surface temperatures across the continental United States in 16 cells that were approximately 1°×2° using 1km² MODIS land surface temperature (LST) data and land cover from the 0.0009km² National Land Cover Database (NLCD). We found that forest surface temperatures tended to be cooler than cropland surface temperatures. This relationship held for spring, summer, fall, and annually.

The Qurayyah Sabkha is located on the western coast of the Arabian Gulf in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The current study aims to determine the number of land cover endmembers that can be detected and mapped using Landsat 7 ETM + and ASTER. Furthermore, the study also aims to determine the spatial distribution of fractional abundances of these endmembers. Clastic sediments, calcite dominate sediments, gypsum, vegetation, water, and quartz sand were identified at the surface the Qurayyah Sabkha using Minimum Noise fraction (MNF), Pixel Purity Index (PPI), and n-D Visualization.

Understanding the growth and changes in urban environments are the most dynamic system on the earth’s surface is critical for urban planning and sustainable management. This study attempts to present a space-borne satellite-based approach to demonstrate the urban change and its relation with land surface temperature (LST) variation in urban areas of Klang valley, Malaysia. For this purpose an object-based nearest neighbour classifier (S-NN) approach was first applied on SPOT 5 data acquired on 2003 and 2010 and subsequently five land cover categories were extracted.

Sustainability indicator systems often use administrative entities as a reference, which may cause over- or underestimations of results within topographically different regions. Within the European Alps the highest impacts due to human activities are concentrated below the potential treeline, making these zones comparable to the potentially highly impacted surroundings of the European Alps. An application of the area below the potential treeline as a reference unit for sustainability indicators allows for a more equitable comparison of the European Alps and their surroundings.

Vector-to-raster conversion is a process accompanied with errors. The errors are classified into predicted errors before rasterization and actual errors after that. Accurate prediction of the errors is beneficial to developing reasonable rasterization technical schemes and to making products of high quality. Analyzing and establishing a quantitative relationship between the error and its affecting factors is the key to error prediction.

Landscape networks and ecosystems worldwide are undergoing changes that may impact in different ways relevant ecological processes such as gene flow, pollination, or wildlife dispersal. A myriad of indices have been developed to characterize landscape patterns, but not all of them are equally suited to evaluate temporal changes in landscape connectivity as is increasingly needed for biodiversity monitoring and operational indicator delivery.

Intense anthropogenic exploitation has altered distribution of forest resources. This change was analyzed using visual interpretation of satellite data of 1979, 1999 and 2009. Field and interactive social surveys were conducted to identify spatial trends in forest degradation and data were mapped on forest cover and land use maps. Perceptions of villagers were compiled in a pictorial representation to understand changes in forest resource distribution in central Himalaya from 1970 to 2010. Forested areas were subject to degradation and isolation due to loss of connecting forest stands.

Timber harvest often results in accelerated soil erosion and subsequent elevated fine (

Area-based information obtained from remote sensing and aerial photography is often used in studies on ecological footprint and sustainability, especially in calculating biocapacity. Given the importance of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP; i.e. the scale dependency of area-based information), a comprehensive understanding of how the changes of biocapacity across scales (i.e. the resolution of data) is pivotal for regional sustainable development.

Development of accurate classification methods for rapidly changing catchments like that of Lake Basaka is fundamental to better understanding the catchment dynamics, which were not addressed in previous studies. Thus, the aim of this study was to map the decadal land use/cover (LUC) regimes of the Lake Basaka catchment, utilizing time series of LANDSAT images and to analyse the changes that occurred at different time periods. Both unsupervised and supervised image classification systems were utilized in Earth Resources Data Analysis System (ERDAS) Imagine (9.1).

Herbaceous biomass, harvested and handled as hay, has potential for bioenergy production. In the Upper Southeast, fields that cannot be competitively managed to produce another crop can produce an acceptable yield of switchgrass. Using a delayed harvest (crop is allowed to dry standing in the field), switchgrass can be harvested from production fields over a 6-month period. This gives a significant advantage over a crop residue, like corn stover, which is collected over a 5-week harvest season in the Midwest. The Southeast has the potential to be a major bioenergy production region.

Accurate identification of urban land use is essential for many applications. However, as physical surfaces of land-cover types are not necessarily related to their use and economic function, differentiating among thematically detailed urban land uses (single-family residential, multi-family residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) using remotely sensed imagery is a challenging task, particularly over large areas.