A large wetland drainage project was initiated in 1912 near the town of Seney, Michigan, U.S.A. This project included the construction of a series of ditches through a large peatland to drain the land for agricultural use. The largest of these ditches was the 35 km long Walsh Ditch. Much of the drained wetland affected by the Walsh Ditch is now managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

The Berchtesgaden National Park (Bavaria, Germany), a study site of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere program in the catchment of Berchtesgadener Ache, is introduced as a platform for interdisciplinary research. As the investigation of how human activities affect the natural resources in the park area, which has been defined a main aim of the program, naturally requires expertise from different scientific fields, interdisciplinary research has been fostered in the national park plan since the very beginning of the Man and the Biosphere program in 1981.

The country of Spain is representative of land change processes in Mediterranean member states of the European Union (EU). These land change processes are often triggered by European, national and sub-national policies and include widespread land abandonment and urbanisation trends, as well as an increase in land use intensities accompanied by strong exploitation of water resources. The Mediterranean is part of the dryland ecoregion, which is particularly vulnerable to ecosystem degradation.

Bi-weekly water quality data from seven monitoring stations located within Tahtali Watershed, İzmir, Turkey and digital land use/land cover data of the same watershed are analyzed in this study. To examine the changes in land use associated with urbanization, the satellite images of the main pool of the Tahtali reservoir prior to filling and subsequent to filling, respectively, are analyzed. Aerial photos of the basin taken in 1995 (October) are compared with images taken in 2005 (November) from the IKONOS satellite through use of several GIS techniques.

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most degraded and threatened globally. A need for systematic assessment of riverine habitats is thus well-documented. Riparian zones are especially important due to the large array of ecosystem and social services they can provide, while also recently gaining a major role in the new European biodiversity policy. In this context, the necessity to gather spatial information on extent, distribution and characteristics of the riparian zones is clear.

There is an increasing interest in applying fractal analysis to measure the spatial complexity of remotely sensed images. This study provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of three fractal algorithms (isarithm, triangular prism, and variogram) for characterizing urban landscapes in Indianapolis, USA, based on eight satellite images taken by five sensors (Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS), Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), and IKONOS).

Silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) is a tree species distributed mainly in central Europe. It once was a dominant tree species within some forests of this region. The causes for its rapid decline in the past two centuries have not yet been sufficiently explained. It is argued that human activities have been largely responsible for expansions and contractions of silver fir populations. On the basis of the current distribution of silver fir, historical maps and palaeoecological data, we describe the expansion of silver fir forests.

Razaksat, a high-resolution Malaysian remote-sensing satellite, was launched on 14 July 2009. It carries a medium-sized aperture camera (MAC) with one panchromatic and four multispectral bands, of 2.5 and 5 m spatial resolution, respectively. The satellite was placed in a near-equatorial orbit with a low inclination angle of 9° to enable an optimum 14 overpasses per day over the equatorial region (i.e. 9° N to 9° S) as compared to only three daily passes over Malaysia for near-polar orbiting satellites.

Greenhouse gas emissions and land use/land cover change (LUCC) are two human activities notably affecting climate change. Will temperature and precipitation increase significantly during global warming resulting in more pronounced LUCC climatic effects? Considering the interannual forcing of these two factors, the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM4.0) was used in this study to investigate the importance of climatological background to LUCC impacts.

Spanish rangelands occupy more than 90,000km² of land grazed by millions of domestic and wild animals. Organic matter content of soil is an essential component for fertility and productivity in both, natural and human-induced ecosystems. Despite its importance to soil quality, soil organic carbon has been little studied in these rangelands. The main goal of this study is to assess the amounts and characteristics of soil organic matter in grazed open woodlands of SW Iberia as influenced by vegetation cover and land management.

Fire management requires an understanding of the spatial characteristics of fire ignition patterns and how anthropogenic and natural factors influence ignition patterns across space. In this study we take advantage of a recent fire ignition database (855 points) to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the spatial pattern of fire ignitions in the western area of Neuquén province (57,649 km²), Argentina, for the 1992–2008 period.

Persistent scatterer synthetic aperture radar interferometry (PSI) is a powerful remote sensing technique to detect and measure deformation of the Earth‘s crust – such as subsidence and landslides – with an accuracy of a few millimeters. Deformation is measured at specific points in a radar image called persistent scatterers (PS), which are characterized by long-term constant backscattering properties (high coherence) of the radar signal.