The reference classifications that serve as the fundamental basis of accuracy assessment of land-cover maps are subject to uncertainty. A fuzzy interval approach is proposed in which linguistic-scale labels assigned to each land-cover class at each sample observation are converted to fuzzy intervals. These fuzzy intervals are then used to produce a fuzzy confusion matrix from which fuzzy thematic accuracy measures analogous to overall, user's, and producer's accuracy are produced.

This paper discusses a statistical and band transformation based approach to select bands for hyperspectral image analysis. Hyperspectral images contain large number of spectral bands with redundant information about the spectral classes in the image scene. It is necessary to reduce the high dimensionality of the data for the processing of hyperspectral data. We report a feature selection technique that removes correlated spectral bands using band decorrelation technique and obtains maximum variance image bands based on factor analysis.

The effects of land management and disturbance on ecosystem performance (i.e. biomass production) are often confounded by those of weather and site potential. The current study overcomes this issue by calculating the difference between actual and expected ecosystem performance (EEP) to generate ecosystem performance anomalies (EPA). This study aims to delineate and quantify average EPA from 2000–2009 within the Greater Platte and Upper Colorado River Basins, USA.

The methane exchange in an oligotrophic mire complex was measured on the ecosystem and microform scale with the eddy covariance (EC) and the closed chamber technique, respectively. Information about the distribution of three distinct microform types in the area of interest and in each 30min EC flux source area was derived from a high-resolution (1m²) landcover map in combination with an analytical source weight model (Kormann and Meixner, 2001).

Recently, localized heavy rainfall over highly urbanized areas has caused severe damage in Japan. Although studies have indicated that the presence of urban areas can intensify rainfall, the chaotic noise caused by differences in initial conditions can change the urban effect. Therefore, the usability of ensemble simulation methods for urban effects on a single localized heavy rainfall event must be clarified to synthesize state-of-the-art observations and numerical model studies. This study examined the difference in a localized heavy rainfall event under different initial conditions.

Human drivers are often proposed to be stronger than biophysical drivers in influencing ecosystem structure and function in highly urbanized areas. In residential land cover, private yards are influenced by individual homeowner preferences and actions while also experiencing large-scale human and biophysical drivers. We studied plant nitrogen (%N) and N stable isotopic composition (δ¹⁵N) in residential yards and paired native ecosystems in seven cities across the US that span major ecological biomes and climatic regions: Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St.

Energy fluxes, including net radiation, latent heat flux and sensible heat flux were determined on clear days during the vegetative period in four types of land cover: wet meadow, pasture, arable field, and an artificial concrete surface. The average net radiation ranged between 123� W� m⁻² at the concrete surface and 164� W� m⁻² at the wet meadow. The mean maximum daytime latent heat ranged between 500 and 600� W� m⁻², which corresponds to an evapotranspiration rate of about 0.2� g� m⁻²� s⁻¹ under the prevailing conditions of the wet meadow.

A dynamic fugacity model was developed to simulate the spatial and seasonal variations of PAHs in Haihe Plain, China. The calculated and measured concentrations exhibited good consistency in magnitude with deviations within a factor of 4 in air and 2 in soil. The spatial distributions of PAHs in air were mainly controlled by emission while the seasonal variations were dominated by emission and gas–particle partition. In soil, the spatial distributions of PAHs were controlled by the soil organic carbon content while the seasonal variations were insignificant.

The habitats of aquatic organisms, including freshwater fishes (Oncorhynchus masou masou, Plecoglossus altivelis altivel, and Cyprinus carpio), fireflies (Luciola cruciata and Luciola lateralis), and frogs (Anura sp.), were evaluated dynamically in the Natori River basin in the central Miyagi prefecture in Japan using water temperature as an environmental index.

The estimation of coverage, i.e., the proportion of the total area in a study region covered by a given target class, is essential to many aspects of environmental monitoring. We analyze and compare the efficiency of different sample-based approaches for the estimation of coverage of different land cover classes from aerial imagery in a case study in Lower Saxony, Germany on the basis of the estimated standard errors.

REVEALS-based quantitative reconstruction of Holocene vegetation cover (expressed in plant functional types, PFTs) is used in the LANDCLIM project to assess the effect of human-induced land-cover change on past climate in NW Europe. Using the Czech Quaternary Pollen Database, this case study evaluates the extent to which selection of data and input parameters for the REVEALS model applications would affect reconstruction outcomes.

The Office de la Haute Vallée du Fleuve Niger (OHVN) zone in southern Mali is a small but important agricultural production region. Against a background of environmental degradation including decades of declining rainfall, soil erosion, and human pressure on forest resources, numerous farming communities stand out through the use of improved soil and water management practices that have improved agricultural and environmental conditions. Field surveys conducted in 1998-2001 indicated that environmental and agricultural conditions have improved in the past decade.