Phytodiversity is affected both by natural and anthropogenic factors and in Island ecosystems these impacts can devastate or reduce diversity, if the native vegetation is lost. In addition to rich species richness and diversity, Island systems are the sites of high endemism and any threat to these ecosystems will consequently lead to loss and extinction of species.

Landscape composition and habitat quality influence the abundance, population structure, and movements of animals. Understanding how an animal interacts with elements of the landscape helps predict its response to habitat loss and changes in land cover. We tested the hypothesis that the extent of movement depends on landscape composition in a threatened freshwater turtle, Emydoidea blandingii. We measured habitat composition at multiple spatial scales, ranging from the home range to the landscape scale.

Climate change is affecting biodiversity worldwide inducing species to either “move, adapt or die”. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for analysing range shifts, namely a catalogue of the possible patterns of change in the distribution of a species along elevational or other environmental gradients and an improved quantitative methodology to identify and objectively describe these patterns.

This paper investigated the spatial and temporal variations of the water vapor pressure (WVP) of the arid region of northwest China (ARNC) from 1961 to 2011. The original daily temperature and relative humidity data were collected from 96 meteorological stations in the region and analyzed by a Mann–Kendall test and linear trend. The results showed that (1) the WVP possesses vertical zonality and longitude zonality, which decreased from the low to high with the elevation increasing, and the WVP changed obviously from the northwest and southeast to the middle of the ARNC.

AIM: The rate of climate change might exceed the migration capacity of plants, particularly where habitats became fragmented by human land use. Except for some tree species, the extent to which habitat fragmentation decreases migration rates has nevertheless been little evaluated. Here, we compare simulated migration rates of understorey herbs, which comprise the big part of temperate forest plant diversity, under varying levels of fragmentation at a continental scale. LOCATION: Europe.

Soil erosion caused by low vegetation cover associated with agricultural land use in the catchment is blamed for the eutrophication of Lake Victoria. Above-ground biomass as an indicator of vegetation cover and biodiversity was assessed using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, estimation of tree density and biomass with the aim of assessing the extent to which vegetation covers the soil surface. Tree density is significantly different between agricultural and semi-natural systems with an average of 96 and 90 trees ha⁻¹ observed in Rakai and Mayuge respectively.

The Dadia forest complex, in the Evros prefecture, in north eastern Greece was designated as a nature reserve in 1980 in order to protect the black vulture (Aegypius monachus) and other raptors. In this paper, the impacts of the protection on the forest growth were assessed using geographic information system (GIS) technologies. The major requirement for almost all research needed for sustainable forest management is extensive and intensive monitoring. GIS is a convenient tool for integrating remotely sensed data and various other kinds geo-referenced data.

Agro-pastoral decline in European mountain areas has recently caused changes to traditional landscapes with negative consequences on semi-natural grassland conservation and the associated biodiversity and ecosystem services. In the Italian Alps, grassland patches enclosed in a forest matrix are progressively disappearing. Two alpine valleys (Pesio and Pejo), having similar land-use history, were chosen as representative of management conditions of western and eastern Italian Alps, respectively.

The rapid urban development in the Hurghada area since the 1980s has dramatically enhanced the potential impact of human activities. To inventory and monitor this urban development effectively, remote sensing provides a viable source of data from which updated land cover information can be extracted efficiently and cheaply.

Recently, object-oriented classification techniques based on image segmentation approaches are being studied using high-resolution satellite images to extract various thematic information. In this study different types of land use/land cover (LULC) types were analysed by employing object-oriented classification approach to dual TerraSAR-X images (HH and HV polarisation) at African Sahel. For that purpose, multi-resolution segmentation (MRS) of the Definiens software was used for creating the image objects.

The objective of this study was to quantify the impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) change on the hydrology of the Jedeb, an agricultural dominated mesoscale catchment, in the Abay/Upper Blue Nile basin, Ethiopia. Two methods have been used. First, the trends of certain daily flow variability parameters were evaluated to detect statistical significance of the change of the hydrologic response. Second, a conceptual monthly hydrological model was used to detect changes in the model parameters over different periods to infer LULC change.