CONTEXT: Policy decisions form a major driver of land use change, with important implications for socially and environmentally susceptible regions. It is well known that there can be major unintended consequences, especially where policies are not tailored to regionally specific contexts. OBJECTIVES: In this paper we assess the implications of 60 years of agricultural policies on soil erosion prevention (SEP) by vegetation, an essential regulating ecosystem service in Mediterranean Europe.

Background: Since phenology is a good bio-indicator of temperature the latter is often used in phenological analyses. However, whilst meteorological data are difficult to interpolate from point measurements at the desired resolution, region-wide digital data, e.g.

The rapid environmental changes occurring in the Brazilian Amazon due to widespread deforestation have attracted the attention of the scientific community for several decades. A topic of particular interest involves the assessment of the combined impacts of selective logging and forest fires. Forest disturbances by selective logging and forest fires may vary in scale, from local to global changes, mostly related to the increase of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

The Grain for Green Project (GGP) is the largest land retirement/afforestation program in China; it was primarily initiated to reduce the soil erosion and improve the ecological conditions in the Loess Plateau in 1999. If effective, this massive regional effort will induce significant improvement in the vegetation conditions. At this time, the effectiveness of the GGP has not been well documented.

The present study examines the long-term effects of land use/land cover (LULC) changes in Rajasthan state, India on land-atmosphere fluxes and, possibly in precipitation and aerosol loading. By comparing the satellite observations from Landsat MSS (1972–73) and IRS-P6 AWiFS (2006–07) considerable LULC changes are observed, an increase in crop-land and vegetated areas of ∼57% in the eastern and ∼68% in the western Rajasthan.

Conservation programs often manage populations indirectly through the landscapes in which they live. Empirically, linking reproductive success with landscape structure and anthropogenic change is a first step in understanding and managing the spatial mechanisms that affect reproduction, but this link is not sufficiently informed by data. Hierarchical multistate occupancy models can forge these links by estimating spatial patterns of reproductive success across landscapes.

Pathogen contamination of waterbodies, which is often identified by the presence of pathogen indicators such as Escherichia coli, is a major water quality concern in the United States. Reducing in-stream pathogen contamination requires an understanding of the combined impacts of land cover, climatic conditions, and anthropogenic activities at the watershed scale. In this study these factors are considered by assessing linear relationships between in-stream E. coli water quality data, watershed indexes, and rainfall for the Squaw Creek Watershed, IA, USA.

Vegetation indices are widely employed to evaluate wetland ecological condition, and are expected to provide sensitive and specific detection of environmental change. Most studies evaluate the performance of condition assessment metrics in the context of the data used to calibrate them. Here we examined the temporal stability of the Florida Wetland Condition Index (FWCI) for vegetation of depressional forested wetlands by resampling sites in 2008 that were previously sampled to develop the FWCI in 2001.

Landslides are very common natural problems in the Selangor area of Malaysia due to the improper use of landcover and tropical rainfall. There are many landslide susceptibility analyses such as statistical, bivariate and data mining approaches exist in the literature. This paper presents the use of fuzzy logic relations for landslide susceptibility mapping on part of Selangor area, Malaysia, using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing data.

Using remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS), the detection of land cover/landuse (LC/LU) spaceies and monitoring changes in particular periods are made easily and economically. CORINE classification was developed in 1985 by countries of the Europeon Union to establish a good harmony especialy with LC/LU classification. This system contains three levels of classification. So far, LC/LU classification has not been fullfilled using large scale CORINE classification in Turkey,.

The Landsat TM/ETM images obtained in 2000, 2006 and 2010 were used to generate Land Use and Land Cover (LULC)maps of Canakkale province including forest,grassland,agriculture,water and residential area bare soil classes.

Çalışmada 2000, 2006 ve 2010 yıllarında alınan Landsat TM/ETM uydu görüntüleri kullanılarak Çanakkale ilinin orman, mera, tarım, su, yerleşim çıplak alan sınıflarını içeren Arazi Kullanım ve Bitki Örtüsü (AKBÖ) haritaları yapılmıştır.

In order for carbon credits awarded for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation of forests (REDD) to be effective, they need to be competitive with alternative land uses. In the case of Southeast Asia, oil palm cultivation is one of the most lucrative possible land uses. Existing mechanisms for awarding certified emission reductions (CERs) might not be adequately flexible to changing commodity prices or to meet the needs of landowners who heavily discount future returns from their land.