The limited amount of studies addressing the long‐term effectiveness of restoration actions to combat land degradation is a constraint for current landscape restoration planning and implementation. Remote sensing data provide a unique opportunity for gathering information on the spatial and temporal variability of restoration processes and may contribute to fill this knowledge gap.

Population of two cities in Pakistan has already crossed the 10-million figure and for the rest of the areas in the country populations are also increasing rapidly. Urbanization has boosted the use of energy in the cities and so is greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but the ground situation as to the extent, vulnerability, past trends and future scenarios are not unveiled for the cities of Pakistan. Dearth of data in Pakistan is a huge hindrance to the investigation of energy use and actual GHG emissions.

1. For north temperate lakes, the well-studied empirical relationship between phosphorus (as measured by total phosphorus, TP), the most commonly limiting nutrient and algal biomass (as measured by chlorophyll a, CHL) has been found to vary across a wide range of landscape settings. Variation in the parameters of these TP-CHL regressions has been attributed to such lake variables as nitrogen/phosphorus ratios, organic carbon and alkalinity, all of which are strongly related to catchment characteristics (e.g. natural land cover and human land use).

This study aims to assess CO₂ levels in China, based on the dry air column-averaged mixing ratios of CO₂ measured by the Scanning Imaging Absorption spectrometer for Atmospheric CartograpHY (SCIAMACHY) instrument on board ENVISAT and emission inventories. A land cover and statistical data set, the Regional emission inventory in Asia (REAS), was also used in this study. The results show that the spatial variations of the CO₂ concentration in the whole of China are obvious, and with clear seasonal fluctuation during 2003–2005.

While crop rotation patterns can be complex with multiple crops rotated over several years, the most common rotation practice in the Central United States is biannual rotation between corn and soybeans. We analyzed the changes in crop rotation patterns from 2003 to 2010 using the Cropland Data Layer (CDL), which provides remotely sensed land cover layers for agricultural crops in the Central United States.

Monitoring land-cover change is often done by simple overlay of two classified maps from different dates. However, such analysis tends to overestimate the rate of change. Main error sources are the mis-registration between classified maps and their thematic accuracies. This study proposes a change detection method with morphological post-processing to improve change detection accuracy in comparison with traditional post-classification by taking into account these error sources.

In Malaysia, areas under oil palm plantations have increased dramatically since the early twentieth century and have resulted in multiple conversions of land change. This paper presents a spatial and temporal model for simulation of oil palm expansion in the Kuala Langat district, Malaysia. The model is an integration of cellular automata (CA), multi-criteria evaluation (MCE), and Markov chain (MC) analysis while MCE provides transition rules of CA iterations and MC analysis assigns a transition probability to each single pixel at the time steps.

The objective of this paper was to quantify long-term land use and land cover changes (LULCC) and to identify the spatial determinants of locations of most systematic transitions for the period 1957–2009 in the Jedeb watershed, Upper Blue Nile Basin. Black and white aerial photographs of 1957 and Landsat imageries of 1972 (MSS), 1986 (TM), 1994 (TM) and 2009 (TM) were used to derive ten land use and land cover classes by integrated use of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS).

Despite numerous ecosystem services provided by urban trees, they are continually threatened by combined natural disturbances, invasive species, development and negligent management practices. This research characterizes the amount and cause of tree loss in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the northeast United States, and neighbouring towns between 2008 and 2010 using multi-source remotely sensed imagery and historical land cover maps (1976–2009).

Adequate quantification of evapotranspiration (ET) is crucial to assess how climate change and land cover change (LCC) interact with the hydrological cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. The Mongolian Plateau plays a unique role in the global climate system due to its ecological vulnerability, high sensitivity to climate change and disturbances, and limited water resources. Here, we used a version of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model that has been modified to use Penman–Monteith (PM) based algorithms to calculate ET.

The Pampean region covers a large surface in central Argentina, but despite the extensive agricultural activities and the high nutrient levels recorded in streams of the region, few authors have analysed the influence of land use on water quality. Here, we evaluated the relationships among catchment attributes (size, morphometry and land cover) and water chemistry in 23 Pampean streams in different seasons (autumn, spring and summer) and at three spatial scales: whole catchment and two scales of riparian buffers (200 and 500 m adjacent to both stream margins).

After the industrial revolution, urban growth has been increasing, especially with technological advances. Urbanization is accelerating environmental pollution and also affects climate significantly because of land use or land cover changes. In this study, the Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) model developed by the United States Environment Protection Agency (USEPA) is used for modeling the impervious areas of Eskişehir which is located in the Porsuk Stream Watershed in Inner Anatolia, Turkey.