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.

In the subsistence-based, nutrient-poor soils, and fertilizer-limited agriculture of northern Ghana, 45–65 % of land cover is annually burned for purposes of hunting and agricultural land preparation. The effects of burn-season, fractional nutrient losses, combusted plant parts and vegetation type on the fire-mediated nutrient cycling are unclear.

Understanding how landscape, host, and pathogen traits contribute to disease exposure requires systematic evaluations of pathogens within and among host species and geographic regions. The relative importance of these attributes is critical for management of wildlife and mitigating domestic animal and human disease, particularly given rapid ecological changes, such as urbanization.

Outdoor water use is a key component in arid city water systems for achieving sustainable water use and ensuring water security. Using evapotranspiration (ET) calculations as a proxy for outdoor water consumption, the objectives of this research are to quantify outdoor water consumption of different land use and land cover types, and compare the spatio-temporal variation in water consumption between drought and wet years.

Central Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions on the planet earth to global climate change, depending on very fragile natural resources. The Soviet legacy has left the five countries (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) with a highly integrated system but they are facing great challenges with tensions that hinder regional coordination of food and water resources.

Industrial agricultural plantations are a rapidly increasing yet largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover change. Here, we evaluate impacts of oil palm plantation development on land cover, carbon flux, and agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. With a spatially explicit land change/carbon bookkeeping model, parameterized using high-resolution satellite time series and informed by socioeconomic surveys, we assess previous and project future plantation expansion under five scenarios.

A long-term, consistent Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FPAR) product is necessary to study the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation dynamics associated with climatic changes and human activities. In this study, Eurasia was selected as the study area.

Little research has been conducted on how differing spatial resolutions or classification techniques affect image-driven identification and categorization of slum neighborhoods in developing nations. This study assesses the correlation between satellite-derived land cover and census-derived socioeconomic variables in Accra, Ghana to determine whether the relationship between these variables is altered with a change in spatial resolution or scale.

The compilation of global Landsat data-sets and the ever-lowering costs of computing now make it feasible to monitor the Earth's land cover at Landsat resolutions of 30 m. In this article, we describe the methods to create global products of forest cover and cover change at Landsat resolutions. Nevertheless, there are many challenges in ensuring the creation of high-quality products. And we propose various ways in which the challenges can be overcome.

Soil water repellency reduces infiltration capacity, enhancing overland flow and even runoff production, and may produce patchiness in water infiltration at the hillslope scale. Knowledge about hydrophobicity in rangelands of Mediterranean type climate and its relation with vegetation cover and land management is sparse. The objectives of the present work are to determine the degree and spatial occurrence of soil water repellency and to define its relationship with site characteristics, such as soil, vegetation and land management in rangelands of SW Spain.

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass.

To better assess the impacts of conservation buffers and grasslands on water quality at large spatial scales, development and integration of novel approaches are crucial to ensure that these land management practices are functioning properly and meeting their original goals. Recent developments in remote sensing technology have greatly enriched the availability of geospatial data that can be used in hydrological modeling to assess the potential hydrological response of conservation practices over larger areas.