Despite the global trend in urbanization, little is known about patterns of biodiversity or provisioning of ecosystem services in urban areas. Bee communities and the pollination services they provide are important in cities, both for small-scale urban agriculture and native gardens. To better understand this important ecological issue, we examined bee communities, their response to novel floral resources, and their potential to provide pollination services in 25 neighborhoods across Chicago, IL (USA).

Peru has the fourth largest area of peatlands in the Tropics. Its most representative land cover on peat is a Mauritia flexuosa dominated palm swamp (thereafter called dense PS), which has been under human pressure over decades due to the high demand for the M. flexuosa fruit often collected by cutting down the entire palm. Degradation of these carbon dense forests can substantially affect emissions of greenhouse gases and contribute to climate change. The first objective of this research was to assess the impact of dense PS degradation on forest structure and biomass carbon stocks.

To meet growing population demands for food and other agricultural commodities, agricultural land-use intensification and extensification seems to be increasing in the Abbay (Upper Blue Nile) basin in Ethiopia. However, the amount, location and degree of suitability of the basin for agriculture seem not well studied and/or documented. From global data sources, literature review and field investigation, a number of agricultural land suitability evaluation criteria were identified.

Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such one-dimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, high spatial and temporal resolution data with global coverage can be used to measure and represent the landscape qualities of urban environments.

This study assessed forest cover change from 1985 to 2016, analyzed community perception on forest cover change and its drivers, and suggested possible solutions in northern Ethiopia. Landsat images of 1985, 2000 and 2016, household interviews and focus group discussions were used. While dense forests and open forests increased by 8.2% and 32.3% respectively between 1985 and 2000, they decreased by 10.4% and 9.8% respectively from 2000 to 2016. Grasslands and cultivated land decreased in the first period by 37.3% and 5.5% but increased in the second period by 89.5% and 28.5% respectively.

Land use/land cover maps derived from remotely sensed imagery are often insufficient in quality for some quantitative application purposes due to a variety of reasons such as spectral confusion. Although object-based classification has some advantages over pixel-based classification in identifying relatively homogeneous land use/cover areas from medium resolution remotely sensed images, the classification accuracy is usually still relatively low.

Context: The fundamental driving force of land use and land cover (LULC) change is related to spatial and temporal processes caused by human activities such as agricultural expansion and demographic change. Landscape metrics were used to analyze post-war changes in a rural mountain landscape, the protected area of Halgurd-Sakran National Park (HSNP) in north-east Iraq. Therefore, the present work attempts to identify the temporal trends of the most fragmented land cover types between two parts of the national park.

In arid regions, oases ecosystems are fragile and sensitive to climate change, and water is the major limiting factor for environmental and socio-economic developments. Understanding the drivers of land use/cover change (LUCC) in arid regions is important for the development of management strategies to improve or prevent environmental deterioration and loss of natural resources.

This study uses a combination of remote sensing data, field interviews and observations, and landscape indices to examine the dynamics of land use and land cover (LULC), identify their driving forces, and analyze their effects on the landscape of Abaya-Chamo Basin (ACB) between 1985, 1995, and 2010. The results reveal that the landscape of ACB has changed considerably during the past 25 years between 1985 and 2010. The main changes observed imply a rapid reduction in shrubland (28.82%) and natural grassland (33.13%), and an increase in arable land (59.15%).