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.

We have investigated multi-temporal polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for urban land-cover classification using an object-based support vector machine (SVM) in combinations of rules. Six-date RADARSAT-2 high-resolution polarimetric SAR data in both ascending and descending passes were acquired in the rural–urban fringe of the Greater Toronto Area during the summer of 2008.

The present study was carried out in Singrauli area of the north India to know the water quality at selected sites. Physico-chemical parameters like pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), bicarbonate, hardness, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, copper, iron, cobalt, manganese, zinc, and chromium were analyzed in 27 water samples. Locations selected for sampling were based on the preliminary field survey carried out to understand the overall impact of mining and industrialization on the surface and groundwater resources of Singrauli.

Information on the effect of direct drivers such as hurricanes on ecosystem services is relevant to landowners and policy makers due to predicted effects from climate change. We identified forest damage risk zones due to hurricanes and estimated the potential loss of 2 key ecosystem services: aboveground carbon storage and timber volume.

The Brazilian program of payment for environmental services (PES) is based on ranges of potential erosion decrease (ED) from soil and water conservation proposals estimated from the Universal Soil Loss Equation. Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) result in many alterations of the basin water balance. Therefore, to contribute to the methodological development of Brazilian PES, this paper proposes a quantification of hydrological benefits based on conservation measures.

The endozoochorous dispersal of weed seeds, mediated by birds and without any adaptation to frugivory, has been studied very rarely. We studied the endozoochorous dispersal of viable seeds by the grey partridge Perdix perdix in agricultural landscape. We assessed the content of intact seeds in 609 grey partridge droppings coming from 21 sampling sites in Poland that included three land-cover types (winter cereals, winter oil-seed rape and stubble fields). We found 159 intact seeds of 13 plant species. Most of them are classified as plants without any evolved adaptations to dispersal.

The population of the medicinal plant, Malabar nut (Justicia adhatoda L.) is shrinking in Dun valley due to habitat fragmentation, invasion by Lantana camara, over-exploitation, and an ever-increasing human population – the most important being the increasing demand on land for agriculture, industries and the urbanization. Predicting potential geographic distribution of the species is important from species and habitat restoration point of view.

The present study examines the long-term effects of land use/land cover (LULC) changes in Rajasthan state, India on land-atmosphere fluxes and, possibly in precipitation and aerosol loading. By comparing the satellite observations from Landsat MSS (1972–73) and IRS-P6 AWiFS (2006–07) considerable LULC changes are observed, an increase in crop-land and vegetated areas of ∼57% in the eastern and ∼68% in the western Rajasthan.

Vegetation indices are widely employed to evaluate wetland ecological condition, and are expected to provide sensitive and specific detection of environmental change. Most studies evaluate the performance of condition assessment metrics in the context of the data used to calibrate them. Here we examined the temporal stability of the Florida Wetland Condition Index (FWCI) for vegetation of depressional forested wetlands by resampling sites in 2008 that were previously sampled to develop the FWCI in 2001.

The Landsat TM/ETM images obtained in 2000, 2006 and 2010 were used to generate Land Use and Land Cover (LULC)maps of Canakkale province including forest,grassland,agriculture,water and residential area bare soil classes.

Çalışmada 2000, 2006 ve 2010 yıllarında alınan Landsat TM/ETM uydu görüntüleri kullanılarak Çanakkale ilinin orman, mera, tarım, su, yerleşim çıplak alan sınıflarını içeren Arazi Kullanım ve Bitki Örtüsü (AKBÖ) haritaları yapılmıştır.

Urbanization in India is rapidly increasing. Dispersed development along highways or surrounding cities and in rural areas is resulting in serious loss of agricultural land, open space, waterbodies, and ecologically sensitive habitats. The management and monitoring of such resources require an understanding of change in land use and land cover. Vadodara City in Gujarat, India, has been chosen as the study area because it is a rapidly developing city with increasing urbanization and industrialization.

Aerosol observations are essential for understanding the Earth's radiation budget and the complexities of climate change, as they are involved in the backscattering of solar radiation and the formation of cloud condensation nuclei. In Hong Kong, the most direct effect is on air quality. Atmospheric haze caused by the emission of aerosols from industrial and vehicular sources creates visibility lower than 8 km for approximately 20% of the time, having risen at 6% per decade since 1980, but regional emissions are at least as influential as local ones.