Provision of clean freshwater is an essential ecosystem service that is under increasing pressure worldwide from a variety of conflicting demands. Water yields differ in relation to land‐cover type. Successful resource management therefore requires accurate information on yields from alternative vegetation types to adequately address concerns regarding water production. Of particular importance are upper watersheds/catchments, regardless of where water is extracted.

This research was conducted in order to assess the environmental impacts of Finchaa irrigation project using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Because of the limited resources only some environmental parameters were selected. These parameters are natural vegetation, soil/land, water quality, climate and health conditions. The normalized vegetation index (NDVI) analysis was used to detect the spatial and temporal change of vegetation biomass in the study area. The result indicated that the natural vegetation biomass is declining.

1. A spatially-extensive data set of stream macroinvertebrate communities from 49 northern New Zealand sites sampled over a 10-year period was analysed to assess relationships between the environment (catchment land-cover, landscape position and regional-scale weather patterns), and (i) community persistence and stability based on the constancy of species occurrence (presence-absence) and abundance (per cent composition), respectively and (ii) the temporal variability of various community condition metrics. 2.

Although there has been considerable interest in the rejuvenation and greening of inner-city schoolyards for several decades, recent studies on the behavioral and environmental impacts of greenspace, particularly tree cover, suggest that greenspace on schools may be more important than previously understood. However, little is known about the conditions and landcover of urban schoolyards. To understand the structure of the landcover on city schoolyards, this study used Geographic Information System software to classify and compare landcover on 258 U.S.

In the framework of the established long-term monitoring of the Carpathian forest ecosystems, the assessment of changes in the plant species richness, type of plant communities and biometric characteristics and health status of forest trees, for getting relevant insights regarding the effects of the type of management, pollution and climate changes upon forest biodiversity and health, is one of the major objectives.

In this study we quantified land cover changes in the arid region of Yulin City, Northwest China between 1985 and 2000 using remote sensing and GIS in conjunction with landscape modeling. Land covers were mapped into 20 categories from multitemporal Landsat TM images. Five landscape indices were calculated from these maps at the land cover patches level. It was found that fallow land decreased by 125,148 ha while grassland and woodland increased by 107,975 and 17,157 ha, respectively.

This paper investigates the spatial relationships between surface fluxes and near-surface atmospheric properties (AP), and the potential errors in flux estimation due to homogeneous atmospheric inputs over heterogeneous landscapes. A large-eddy simulation (LES) model is coupled to a surface energy balance scheme with remotely sensed surface temperature Ts as a key boundary condition. Simulations were performed for different agricultural regions having major contrasts in Ts, canopy cover, and surface rough- ness z0 between vegetated/irrigated and bare soil areas.

Riparian forests are increasingly threatened by urban expansion and land use change worldwide. This study examined the relationships between landscape characteristics and woody plant diversity, structure, and composition of small order riparian corridors along an urban-rural land use gradient in the Georgia Piedmont, US. Riparian plant diversity, structure, and composition were related to landscape metrics and land use. Species richness was negatively associated with impervious surfaces and landscape diversity, and positively associated with forest cover and largest forest patch index.

Agricultural development on floodplains contributes to hydrologic alteration and forest fragmentation, which may alter landscape-level processes. These changes may be related to shifts in the seed bank composition of floodplain wetlands. We examined the patterns of seed bank composition across a floodplain watershed by looking at the number of seeds germinating per m² by species in 60 farmed and intact forested wetlands along the Cache River watershed in Illinois.

Ensemble classification is an emerging approach to land cover mapping whereby the final classification output is a result of a consensus of classifiers. Intuitively, an ensemble system should consist of base classifiers which are diverse i.e. classifiers whose decision boundaries err differently. In this paper ensemble feature selection is used to impose diversity in ensembles. The features of the constituent base classifiers for each ensemble were created through an exhaustive search algorithm using different separability indices.