The concept of Ecosystem Services has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. Among the different categories, typical Ecosystem Services categories such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban contexts.

Image fusion assists in visual interpretation, mapping, change detection and many other applications. Multispectral and Panchromatic images are fused to produce images having enhanced spatial and spectral properties. These properties are generally distorted from original images. The aim of this paper is to identify the effectiveness of the several fusion techniques based on the distortions and applications.

Beef cattle grazing is the dominant land use in the extensive tropical and sub-tropical rangelands of northern Australia. Despite the considerable knowledge on land and herd management gained from both research and practical experience, the adoption of improved management is limited by an inability to predict how changes in practices and combinations of practices will affect cattle production, economic returns and resource condition.

Digital image classification is the process of sorting all the pixels in an image into a finite number of individual classes. But, it is difficult to classify satellite images since they include both pure pixels and boundary pixels. The boundary pixels are ‘mixed’ pixels, representing an area occupied by more than one ground cover. That is, class boundaries represented by pixels, are not sharp but fuzzy. This paper discuses the application of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for classification of remotely sensed images that contains mixed pixels.

This study analyses forest dynamics and land use/land cover change over a 43-year period using spatial-stand-type maps of temporal forest management plans of Karaisalı Forest Enterprise in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of Turkey. Stand parameters (tree species, crown closures and developmental stages) of the dynamics and changes caused by natural or artificial intervention were introduced and mapped in a Geographic Information System (GIS) and subjected to fragmentation analysis using FRAGSTATS.

Suburban areas continue to grow rapidly and are potentially an important land-use category for anthropogenic carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Here eddy covariance techniques are used to obtain ecosystem-scale measurements of CO₂ fluxes (FC) from a suburban area of Baltimore, Maryland, USA (2002–2006). These are among the first multi-year measurements of FC in a suburban area. The study area is characterized by low population density (1500inhabitants km⁻²) and abundant vegetation (67.4% vegetation land-cover).

There have long been concerns that federal crop insurance subsidies may significantly impact land use decisions. It is well known that classical insurance market information asymmetry problems can lead to a social excess of risky land entering crop production. Our conceptual model shows that the problem will arise absent any information failures. This is because the subsidy is i) proportional to acres planted, and ii) greatest for the most production risky land.

Changes in the use of land in the United States produce significant economic and environmental effects with important implications for a wide variety of policy issues, including protection of wildlife habitat, management of urban growth, and mitigation of global climate change. In contrast to previous descriptive and qualitative analyses of the trends in national land use, this paper uses an econometric approach to isolate the importance of historical changes in land-use profits and key government policies in determining national land-use changes from 1982 to 1997.

We exploited publicly available satellite- and aircraft-based imagery to estimate urban vegetation cover fraction and land use by class for a semiarid urban area that includes Phoenix, AZ, USA, using low-cost and technologically modest tools. This technique is also used to evaluate two satellite-derived tree cover datasets as well as to compare estimates from the present study with land cover data generated from another study performed using the same study domain.

The article presents ecological and economic zoning of the territory of the Republic of Belarus for the purposes of land use planning by the method of average differences, taking into account the factors which influence the efficiency of agricultural lands usage.

The use of three-dimensional (3D) property rights has for many years been a tool for providing secure and lasting rights for the use of land and its volume of space in complex situations involving land use in the urban society. The aim of this article is to investigate the reasons for introducing 3D property in a legal system. This is illustrated by using the Swedish system as an example. In general, without the possibility of forming 3D property units with direct ownership, other forms have to be used, such as indirect ownership or granted user rights.