CONTEXT: Understanding the causes and consequences of land use and land cover change in drylands is crucial for global sustainability. Inner Mongolia consists of arid and semiarid ecosystems of global importance. OBJECTIVES: Our main goal was twofold: to review the patterns and drivers of land use and land cover change in Inner Mongolia, and to discuss ecological impacts and strategies for promoting landscape and regional sustainability. METHODS: We took an interdisciplinary and retrospective approach, based on historical records and remote sensing data.

The change in the land use pattern due to rapid urbanization adversely affects the hydrological processes in a catchment, leading to a deteriorating water environment. The increase in impervious areas disrupts the natural water balance. Reduced infiltration increases runoff and leads to higher flood peaks and volumes even for short duration low intensity rainfall. Due to their destructive effects, floods can significantly increase the expenses on mitigation efforts. The present study focuses on the Thirusoolam sub watershed, an urban watershed in Chennai.

The status of urban forests and other green open spaces has always been ambiguous within the context of rural-urban peripheries. On one hand, most European countries have introduced protected green zones around cities to contain their sprawl and to provide urban dwellers recreational space and sanitation services since the early days of city planning policies. On the other hand, the ecosystems of green open areas remain under high pressure due to high demand for suburban land, causing issues ranging from illegal dumping to ecosystem fragmentation and forest loss.

The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called 'landscape mosaic' as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km2 study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible landscape mosaic classes according to the proportions of natural, developed, and agriculture land-cover types in a surrounding 4.41-ha neighborhood.

As urbanization in the landscape increases, some urban centers are setting aside habitat for wildlife. This habitat may be particularly valuable to declining or conservation-priority species. One group in particular need of conservation actions that may benefit from habitat located in urban areas is grassland birds. Declines of grassland bird species have been particularly severe in the Midwestern U.S., where most grassland cover has been lost, fragmented, and surrounded by unsuitable habitat.

This research examines the spatio-temporal trends in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Global Inventory Modelling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series to ascribe land use change and precipitation to observed changes in land cover from 1982 to 2007 in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, using seasonal trend analysis (STA).

Turkey (Türkiye) lies at the nexus of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Turkey’s location, mountains, and its encirclement by three seas have resulted in high terrestrial, fresh water, and marine biodiversity. Most of Turkey’s land area is covered by one of three biodiversity hotspots (Caucasus, Irano-Anatolian, and Mediterranean). Of over 9000 known native vascular plant species, one third are endemic.

The assessment of the value of ecosystem services is a valuable tool for biodiversity conservation that can facilitate better environmental policy decision-making and land management, and can help land managers develop interventions to compensate for biodiversity loss at the patch level. Previous studies have suggested that it is appropriate to assess the value of biodiversity for conservation planning by considering both the condition of the landscape and the spatial configuration of adjacent land uses that can be reflected as a proximity effect.

Impervious surface mapping has become a recent concern in remote-sensing applications because of worldwide urban growth and the resultant environmental changes. However, many effective impervious surface mapping techniques developed for moderate-resolution imagery are not applicable to high spatial resolution imagery such as that of IKONOS and the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) due to their limited number of spectral bands and the lack of middle-infrared bands.

Land use change can alter the ecological mechanisms that influence infectious disease exposure in animal populations. However, few studies have empirically integrated the environmental, spatial, and dietary patterns of wildlife epidemiology. We investigate how urbanization, habitat type, and dietary behavior are associated with coyote (Canis latrans) parasitism structure along a gradient of rural to urban land cover using multivariate redundancy analyses. Coyote fecal samples were collected in eight urban and six rural sites in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.