Land conversion in sub‐Saharan Africa has profound biophysical, ecological, political and social consequences for human well‐being and ecosystem services. Understanding the process of land cover changes and transitions is essential for good ecosystem management policy that would lead to improved agricultural production, human well‐being and ecosystems health. This study aimed to assess land cover transitions in a typical semi‐arid degraded agro‐ecosystems environment within the Pangani river basin in northern Tanzania.

Human alveolar echinococcosis, caused by the metacestode stage of Echinococcus multilocularis, is one of the most pathogenic zoonoses in the temperate and arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere. To investigate the spatial distribution of E. multilocularis and the factors influencing this distribution in the recently identified endemic area of Hungary, 1612 red fox (Vulpes vulpes) carcasses were randomly collected from the whole Hungarian territory from November 2008 to February 2009 and from November 2012 to February 2013.

Since the 1950s, with national policy changes and socio-economic development, the habitat of the giant pandas has altered accordingly. This can also be inferred from the population changes of the giant pandas as reported in three national surveys. Thus, monitoring the changes in giant panda habitat and then taking appropriate action would be a valuable contribution to giant panda protection. In this paper, using existing habitats and potential habitats of the giant pandas as the study area, multitemporal remotely sensed data from the three national surveys are used as the data source.

Land conversion is one of the major global changes that threaten population viability. As with many industrial activities, quarrying highly modifies land cover, destroying previous habitats but also creating new conditions potentially supporting functioning and connectivity of pioneer species. Using a multi-landscape and -temporal approach, we assessed the impact of quarrying on the genetic diversity of two amphibians with contrasted ecological constraints: the common toad (Bufo bufo) and the natterjack toad (Bufo calamita), favouring vegetated and pioneer environments, respectively.

In New York State, the golden-winged warbler (GWW), a state species of special concern, has recently been found to nest in swamp forest habitat in Sterling Forest State Park in the Hudson Highlands ecoregion. These swamp forest breeding territories are often embedded in a mosaic of wetland cover types. An accurate map of wetlands in the Hudson Highlands would be a useful input to a GWW habitat suitability model and could help conservation managers better allocate limited resources towards GWW monitoring and habitat management.

Multiple classifier systems (MCS) are attracting increasing interest in the field of pattern recognition and machine learning. Recently, MCS are also being introduced in the remote sensing field where the importance of classifier diversity for image classification problems has not been examined.

When attempting to address the environmental problems of a catchment, it is important to consider changes in a long-term environmental context. However, the long-term data on the state of the environment that are required for such an examination are rarely documented. Such data collection typically requires several years of investigation and observation. In addition, as there may be a significant time lag between the occurrence of a phenomenon and its cause, subsequent environmental investigations of changing animal and plant states scaling up to 5 years may be inadequate.

Erosion is one of the most important natural hazard phenomena in the world, and it poses a significant threat to Turkey in terms of land degredation and desertification. To cope with this problem, we must determine which areas are erosion-prone. Many studies have been carried out and different models and methods have been used to this end. In this study, we used a logistic regression to prepare an erosion susceptibility map for the Ayvalık region in Balıkesir (NW Turkey).

Ecology and Quaternary palaeoecology have largely developed as parallel disciplines. Although both pursue related questions, information exchange is often hampered by particularities of the palaeoecological data and a communication gap has been perceived between the disciplines. Based on selected topics and developments mainly in Quaternary palaeoecology, we show that both disciplines have converged somewhat during recent years, while we still see untapped potential for closer interactions.

Remote sensing data is routinely used in ecology to investigate the relationship between landscape pattern as characterised by land use and land cover maps, and ecological processes. Multiple factors related to the representation of geographic phenomenon have been shown to affect characterisation of landscape pattern resulting in spatial uncertainty. This study investigated the effect of the interaction between landscape spatial pattern and geospatial processing methods statistically; unlike most papers which consider the effect of each factor in isolation only.

Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiologic agent of Chagas' disease, is enzootic in animal populations of the southeastern United States. In the United States, T. cruzi prevalence has been reported for over 20 different wildlife species, and 7 autochthonous human cases have been documented since 1955. Previous canine (Canis familiaris) serosurveys have been limited either by small sample size or confined geographic reporting areas.

The distributed hydrology soil vegetation model (DHSVM) is applied in the 107 km² Nam Mae Rim watershed (NMRW) in northern Thailand. Simulations using land cover scenarios for 1989 and 2002, extreme deforestation, and forest, each run with and without roads, show that roads have very small effects on the mean water fluxes, but significantly increase peak flows for all land cover scenarios. The magnitude of the road effect on peak flow depends on the land cover context in which the roads are placed.