Temporal variations in land-atmosphere water vapor exchange are more pronounced in seasonal environments, especially grass-dominated savannas (known as campo sujo Cerrado) of the southern and eastern Amazon Basin. Recent work in campo sujo indicates that rates of canopy conductance (gc) were directly and indirectly affected by a variety of meteorological variables, which limited our understanding of how seasonal variation in meteorology affected rates of gc. Thus, our overall objective here is to determine how individual meteorological variables affect seasonal variations in gc.

An optimized artificial immune network-based classification model, namely OPTINC, was developed for remote sensing-based land use/land cover (LULC) classification.

In the last decades, due to climate changes, soil deterioration and land use/land cover (LULC) changes, land degradation (LD) has become one of the most important issues at the global, regional and local scale. In concrete terms, LD determines a reduction in the productivity of a territory and in its capacity of providing ecosystem goods and services. “Syndromes” of LD can be assessed in the past, and scenarios, conversely, can be developed for the future, as information baselines for sustainable land management strategies and interventions.

Observational evidence of the impacts of land use/land cover change (LULCC) on changes in surface solar radiation (SSR) in eastern China (EC) during 1979–2008 are identified by using diurnal temperature range as a proxy of SSR and by using observation minus reanalysis approach to disentangle these effects. For the period 1979–2008, the impact of LULCC is shown as a reduction in SSR in most stations in EC, whereas SSR in the reanalysis data has increased at nearly every location.

The Simple Biosphere Model (SiB2) and the 2 × 2 km resolution National Land use/Land Cover database were used to investigate the effects of Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) on land surface energy balance and climate in Jilin Province, northeast China, from 1990 to 2005. The spatial patterns of the components of surface energy balance (i.e., net radiation (R ₙ), latent heat (LH), sensible heat (SH), and albedo (α)) and climate (i.e., canopy temperature (T c), diurnal temperature range (DTR)), as well as the roles of land cover type in variations of energy balance and climate, were investigated.

Transferable development rights (TDRs) can be used as a local planning tool to preserve land for particular uses. TDRs separate ownership of the right to develop land from ownership of the land itself, creating a market in which the development rights can be bought and sold. Landowners who sell TDRs permanently preserve their land in an undeveloped state; those TDRs are then used to increase the density of development elsewhere. In this paper, we evaluate a TDR program for preserving farmland in Calvert County, Maryland.

Accurate built-up information is imperative for loss estimation and disaster management after the occurrence of catastrophic events such as earthquake, tornado, tsunami and flood. These catastrophic events leave behind a trail of mass destruction with property and human losses amounting to millions. Once a natural disaster hits a region, built-up information is required within a short span of time for disaster management. Nowadays, earth observation satellite imagery serves as a promising source to extract the land use / land cover classes.

Satellite-derived contemporary land-cover land-use (LCLU) and albedo data and modeled future LCLU are used to study the impact of LCLU change from 2000 to 2050 on surface albedo and radiative forcing for 19 ecoregions in the eastern United States. The modeled 2000–2050 LCLU changes indicate a future decrease in both agriculture and forested land and an increase in developed land that induces ecoregion radiative forcings ranging from −0.175 to 0.432 W m⁻² driven predominately by differences in the area and type of LCLU change.

A framework is described that has been used to assess the effect of the European Commission's Agenda 2000 proposal on the Dumfries and Galloway region, Scotland. The model assesses the impact of agriculture on land-use patterns, the environment and socio-economics of the region. It incorporates a farm-type linear programming sub-model with environmental and socio-economic sub-models.

In this work, we used the Regional Hydro‐Ecological Simulation System (RHESSys) model to examine runoff sensitivity to land cover changes in a mountain environment. Two independent experiments were evaluated where we conducted simulations with multiple vegetation cover changes that include conversion to grass, no vegetation cover and deciduous/coniferous cover scenarios. The model experiments were performed at two hillslopes within the Weber River near Oakley, Utah watershed (USGS gauge # 10128500).

Habitat specialists living in metapopulations are sensitive to habitat fragmentation. In most studies, the effects of fragmentation on such species are analyzed based on Euclidean inter-patch distances. This approach, however, ignores the role of the landscape matrix. Recently, therefore, functional distances that account for the composition of the landscape surrounding the habitat patches have been used more frequently as indicators for patch occupancy.