Urban and community forests play an important role in the overall carbon budget of the USA. Accurately quantifying carbon sequestration by these forests can provide insight for strategic planning to mitigate greenhouse gas effects on climate change. This study provides a new methodology to…

Several key indicators of the sustainability of biofuels are related to the land used to produce the feedstock. Most of the agronomic costs and energy use (fertilizers, herbicides, soil preparation, and harvesting) are more related to the cropped area than to the feedstock quantity produced;…

The Land Transformation Model (LTM) is hierarchically coupled with meso-scale drivers to project urban growth across the conterminous USA. Quantity of urban growth at county and place (i.e., city) scales is simulated using population, urban density and nearest neighbor dependent attributes. We…

Satellite-derived contemporary land-cover land-use (LCLU) and albedo data and modeled future LCLU are used to study the impact of LCLU change from 2000 to 2050 on surface albedo and radiative forcing for 19 ecoregions in the eastern United States. The modeled 2000–2050 LCLU changes indicate a…

Marginal land provides an alternative potential for food and bioenergy production in the face of limited land resources; however, effective assessment of marginal lands is not well addressed. Concerns over environmental risks, ecosystem services and sustainability for marginal land have been…

Wind energy is the fastest-growing segment of new electrical power capacity in the United States, with the potential for significant growth in the future. To facilitate such growth, a number of concerns between developers and landowners must be resolved, including assurance of wind turbine…

Conservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation…

Water is critical to protecting wetlands in arid regions, especially in agriculture-dominated watersheds. This comparative case study analyzes three federal wildlife refuges in the Bear River Basin of the U.S. West where refuge managers secured water supplies by adapting to their local…

The ability to spatially quantify changes in the landscape and create land-cover maps is one of the most powerful uses of remote sensing. Recent advances in object-based image analysis (OBIA) have also improved classification techniques for developing land-cover maps. However, when using an OBIA…

Uses of high spatial resolution data obtained from satellite-based sensors include creating land cover maps, deriving large-scale quantitative assessments such as vegetation indices, and visually assessing an area for qualitative information only assessable from large-scale digital data. One of…

During the last decade, the use of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for drought monitoring applications has drawn many criticisms, mainly because a number of drivers such as land-cover/land-use change, pest infestation, and flooding may depress the NDVI, further causing false…

This article examines a series of controversies concerning migratory deer ranges in Deschutes County, Oregon, USA, to reveal a set of tensions in the process of governing landscapes on the urban fringe. The complex and contentious processes involved in decisions concerning the zoning of these…