A comparison between half-hourly and daily measured and computed evapotranspiration (ET) using three models of different complexity, namely, the Priestley–Taylor (P-T), the reference Penman–Monteith (P-M) and the Common Land Model (CLM), was conducted using three AmeriFlux sites under different land cover and climate conditions (i.e. arid grassland, temperate forest and subhumid cropland).

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. In this study, a discrete classification approach to LCLUC identification based on stable training sites is tested on a nine-date, 4-year Landsat-7 ETM + time sequence for a study area in Ghana that is prone to cloud cover.

Domestic cats are suspected to have an impact on wild populations of birds and small mammals, but published reports of predation on bats are either rare or anecdotal. We based our study on 1012 records of bats admitted at four wildlife rescue centres in peninsular Italy in 2009–2011.

Agro-pastoral decline in European mountain areas has recently caused changes to traditional landscapes with negative consequences on semi-natural grassland conservation and the associated biodiversity and ecosystem services. In the Italian Alps, grassland patches enclosed in a forest matrix are progressively disappearing. Two alpine valleys (Pesio and Pejo), having similar land-use history, were chosen as representative of management conditions of western and eastern Italian Alps, respectively.

Recently, object-oriented classification techniques based on image segmentation approaches are being studied using high-resolution satellite images to extract various thematic information. In this study different types of land use/land cover (LULC) types were analysed by employing object-oriented classification approach to dual TerraSAR-X images (HH and HV polarisation) at African Sahel. For that purpose, multi-resolution segmentation (MRS) of the Definiens software was used for creating the image objects.

Combining spatially explicit land cover data from remote-sensing and faunal data from field observations is increasingly applied for landscape-scale habitat and biodiversity assessments, but without modelling changes quantitatively over time. In a novel approach, we used a long-term time series including historical map data to predict the influence of one century of tropical forest change on keystone species or indicator groups in the Kakamega–Nandi forests, western Kenya.

Sigificant dependence from climate and anthropogenic influences characterize ecological systems of Kazakhstan. As result of the geographical location of the republic and ecological situation vegetative degradation sites exist throughout the territory of Kazakhstan. The major process of desertification takes place in the arid and semi-arid areas. To allocate spots of stable degradation of vegetation, the transition zone was first identified. Productivity of vegetation in transfer zone is slightly dependent on climate conditions.

The response of West African climate zones to anthropogenic climate change during the late 21st century is investigated using the revised Thornthwaite climate classification applied to ensembles of CMIP5, CORDEX, and higher-resolution RegCM4 experiments (HIRES). The ensembles reproduce fairly well the observed climate zones, although with some notable discrepancies. CORDEX and HIRES provide realistic fine-scale information which enhances that from the coarser-scale CMIP5, especially in the Gulf of Guinea encompassing marked landcover and topography gradients.

The objective of this study was to quantify the impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) change on the hydrology of the Jedeb, an agricultural dominated mesoscale catchment, in the Abay/Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia. Two methods have been used. First, the trends of certain daily flow variability parameters were evaluated to detect statistical significance of the change of the hydrologic response. Second, a conceptual monthly hydrological model was used to detect changes in the model parameters over different periods to infer LULC change.

The rapid urban development in the Hurghada area since the 1980s has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of human activities. To inventory and monitor this urban development effectively, remote sensing provides a viable source of data from which updated land cover information can be extracted efficiently and cheaply.

A significant barrier to the assessment of ecosystem services is a lack of primary data, especially for cultural ecosystem services. Spatial value transfer, also known as benefits transfer, is a method to identify the probable locations of ecosystem services based on empirical spatial associations found in other geographic locations. To date, there has been no systematic evaluation of spatial value transfer methods for cultural ecosystem services identified through participatory mapping methods.

The southeastern USA is home to one of the richest—and most imperiled and threatened—freshwater fish assemblages in North America. For many of these rare and threatened species, conservation efforts are often limited by a lack of data. Drawing on a unique and extensive data set spanning over 20 years, we modeled occurrence probabilities of 126 stream fish species sampled throughout North Carolina, many of which occur more broadly in the southeastern USA.