Montado decline has been reported since the end of the nineteenth century in southern Portugal and increased markedly during the 1980s. Consensual reports in the literature suggest that this decline is due to a number of factors, such as environmental constraints, forest diseases, inappropriate management, and socioeconomic issues. An assessment on the pattern of montado distribution was conducted to reveal how the extent of land management, environmental variables, and spatial factors contributed to montado area loss in southern Portugal from 1990 to 2006.

Urbanization is becoming increasingly important in terms of climate change and ecosystem functionality worldwide. We are only beginning to understand how the processes of urbanization influence ecosystem dynamics and how peri-urban environments contribute to climate change. Brisbane in South East Queensland (SEQ) currently has the most extensive urban sprawl of all Australian cities. This leads to substantial land use changes in urban and peri-urban environments and the subsequent gaseous emissions from soils are to date neglected for IPCC climate change estimations.

Policy-makers are paying increasing attention to ecosystem services, given improved understanding that they underpin human well-being, and following their integration within the Aichi Targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Decision-makers need information on trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services but tools for assessing the latter are often expensive, technically demanding and ignore the local context.

Burmese Pythons (Python bivitattus) are large generalist predators that have established an expanding breeding population in Florida. As a first step in understanding current distributions, and therefore spread potential, we assessed diurnal habitat selection by Burmese Pythons in the southern Everglades using radiotelemetry. Sixteen individual pythons were radio-tracked between September 2006 and December 2009. Habitat variables included land cover, habitat edges, surface water depth, and change in water depth.

A new phytoplankton-based index was designed to respond to the Water Framework Directive (WFD) requirements concerning the assessment of lake ecological status. The “Indice Phytoplancton Lacustre” (IPLAC) is a multimetric index, taking into account biomass, abundance and species composition of communities. The first metric is based on the total phytoplankton biomass (MBA), the second on the abundance and taxonomic composition (MCS) of 165 indicator taxa. The IPLAC was developed on 2 independent databases, one for the calibration and the second for the validation of the metrics.

The gap between point measurements made during a measurement campaign and the required discrete data of human thermal comfort in the form of maps could be overcome by statistical or numerical models. City planners usually demand thermal maps with a resolution below 50m. The required input data for the statistical models were meteorological data at high resolution as well as land use and land cover data including morphological data. Meteorological data were obtained through car traverses on a measuring campaign on hot summer days in July 2014.

The past two decades saw rapid and massive urbanization and industrialization in China. Despite much research has been reportedly done at local and regional scales, little has been reported on the trajectories, patterns, and drivers of these two intertwining processes at the national level. This is mainly due to the fact that until recently, high resolution spatial data of land use and land cover change were not available at national level. The research reported in this paper aimed to fill this knowledge gap.

Landscape similarity search involves finding landscapes from among a large collection that are similar to a query landscape. An example of such collection is a large land cover map subdivided into a grid of smaller local landscapes, a query is a local landscape of interest, and the task is to find other local landscapes within a map which are perceptually similar to the query. Landscape search and the related task of pattern-based regionalization, requires a measure of similarity – a function which quantifies the level of likeness between two landscapes.

Dams strongly impair the fluvial environment by altering downstream flows. We analysed riverscapes downstream of three dams and hypothesized that different dam types in rivers with diverse history of land-use and land cover (LULC) change have significant riparian cover differences at diverse biogeomorphic units (banks, riverbanks, islands). We performed a temporal comparison using pre-dam (1965) and post-dam (2013) high-resolution airborne imagery. A new approach was devised to correct the spatial offset between historical and contemporary imagery.

The initial step in most object-based classification methodologies is the application of a segmentation algorithm to define objects. In the context of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image analysis, the presence of speckle noise might hamper the segmentation quality. The aim of this study is to assess the segmentation performance of SAR images when no filter or different filters are applied before segmentation.

Moderate-grained data may not always represent landscape structure in adequate detail which could cause misleading results. Certain metrics have been shown to be predictable with changes in scale; however, no studies have verified such predictions using independent fine-grained data.Our objective was to use independently derived land cover datasets to assess relationships between metrics based on fine- and moderate-grained data for a range of analysis extents.

In this paper we analyse the extent of fire-induced forest degradation in Mato Grosso State, Brazil. We utilise a sample based approach used in a previous pan-tropical deforestation survey to derive information on land cover and burned areas in the two major biomes of Mato Grosso: Amazon and Cerrado. Land cover and burned area are mapped for three years (2000–2005–2010) over 77 sample sites (10000ha each) distributed systematically throughout the state which covers 90.337 Mha.