Identification of suitable site for urban development in hilly areas is one of the critical issues of planning. Site suitability analysis has become inevitable for delineating appropriate site for various developmental initiatives, especially in the undulating terrain of the hills. The study illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) and multicriteria evaluation (MCE) technique for selection of suitable sites for urban development in Mussoorie municipal area, Dehradun district, Uttarakhand.

In this paper a new approach for fractal based dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral data has been proposed. The features have been generated by multiplying variogram fractal dimension value with spectral energy. Fractal dimension bears the information related to the shape or characteristic of the spectral response curves and the spectral energy bears the information related to class separation.

Woody biomass production is a critical indicator in evaluation of land use management and the dynamics of the global carbon cycle (sequestration/emission) in terrestrial ecosystems. The objective of the present study was to develop, through a case study in Sudan, an operational multiscale remote-sensing-based methodology for large-scale estimation of woody biomass in tropical savannahs. Woody biomass estimation models obtained by different authors from destructive field measurements in different tropical savannah ecosystems were expressed as functions of tree canopy cover (CC).

Rapid land use/land cover changes have taken place in many cities of Turkey. Land use and land cover changes are essential for wide range of applications. In this study, Landsat TM satellite imageries date from 1987, 1993, 2000 and 2010 were used to analyse temporal and spatial changes in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey. Zonguldak and Eregli two largest and economic important cities which have been active coal mining and iron fabric areas.

The European turtle dove is both a highly valued game species and a species of conservation concern, which is declining due probably to a combination of habitat degradation and unsustainable hunting. Although declines seem to be less severe in the Mediterranean region, it remains uncertain the extent to which ongoing land use changes will negatively affect this species. This study examined this issue, by estimating the effects of landscape composition on the broad scale abundance pattern of breeding turtle doves in continental Portugal.

Habitat assessments for biodiversity conservation are often complicated by the lack of detailed knowledge of a study species’ distribution. As an alternative to resource-intensive field-based methods to obtain such information, remotely sensed products can be utilized in species distribution models to infer a species’ distribution and ecological needs. Here we demonstrate how to arbitrate among a variety of remotely sensed predictor variables to estimate the distribution and ecological needs of an endangered butterfly species occurring mainly in inaccessible areas.

The integration of spectral, textural, and topographic information using a random forest classifier for land-cover mapping in the rugged Nujiang Grand Canyon was investigated in this study. Only a few land-cover categories were accurately discriminated using spectral information exclusively, with an overall accuracy of 0.56 and a kappa coefficient of 0.51.

Examination of the diurnal variations in surface urban heat islands (UHIs) has been hindered by incompatible spatial and temporal resolutions of satellite data. In this study, a diurnal temperature cycle genetic algorithm (DTC-GA) approach was used to generate the hourly 1 km land-surface temperature (LST) by integrating multi-source satellite data. Diurnal variations of the UHI in ‘ideal’ weather conditions in the city of Beijing were examined. Results show that the DTC-GA approach was applicable for generating the hourly 1 km LSTs.

Shifting cultivation systems have been blamed as the primary cause of tropical deforestation and are being transformed through various forms of conservation and development policies and through the emergence of new markets for cash crops. Here, we analyze the outcomes of different policies on land use/land cover change (LUCC) in a traditional, shifting cultivation landscape in the Atlantic Forest (Brazil), one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots.

Fringe mangroves are recognised as a highly valuable resource due to their provision of multiple ecosystem services. However, accelerating human-pressures on mangrove forests are resulting in the loss of key mangrove ecosystem services. In this paper, we assessed spatial–temporal changes in the extent and width of fringe mangroves, and changes in adjacent land use. The study focused on the Kien Giang Province, Vietnam, for the period 1989–2009.

Urban areas are the most dynamic region on earth. Their size has been constantly increased during the past and this process will go on in the future. Since there is no standard policy and guidelines for construction of buildings and urban planning, cities tend to have irregular growth. Many cities in the world face the problem of urban sprawl in its suburbs. So issues of urban sprawl need to be settled with the help of technologies such as satellite remote sensing and automated change detection.

Landscape fragmentation is important in investigating changing biodiversity patterns. Several current software programs calculate landscape fragmentation metrics. The most prevalent of these programs are only compatible with raster-format land cover maps. However, with advancing classification techniques, vector-format maps are becoming more popular. The new program PolyFrag computes fragmentation metrics for vector-based maps, is flexible and comprehensive, and outputs metrics similar to those of the widely used raster-based programs, like FRAGSTATS.