Tropical mountain regions are prone to landslide hazards. Given the current land pressure with increasing occupation of steep uplands, landslide hazards are expected to increase in the near future. Understanding the factors that control landslide hazards is therefore essential. Rare event logistic regression allows us to perform a robust detection of landslide controlling factors. This technique is here applied to the tropical Andes to evaluate the impact of dynamic land cover changes on landslide occurrences. Land cover change trajectories (i.e.

The distribution of invasive plants across a landscape is largely governed by disturbance invoking anthropogenic land-use practices and propagule pressure. However, spatial variability associated with anthropogenic disturbances and propagule pressure is seldom used to develop distribution models of invasive plants. This study makes use of large-scale survey data to develop a spatially explicit predictive model for the invasive wetland plant—purple loosestrife.

Modeled carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions from an urban area are validated against direct eddy-covariance flux measurements. Detailed maps of modeled local carbon-dioxide emissions for a 4 km² residential neighborhood in Vancouver, BC, Canada are produced. Inputs to the emission model include urban object classifications (buildings, trees, land-cover) automatically derived from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and optical remote sensing in combination with census, assessment, traffic and measured radiation and climate data.

Surface albedo determines radiative forcing and is a key parameter for driving Earth’s climate. Better characterization of surface albedo for individual land cover types can reduce the uncertainty in estimating changes to Earth’s radiation balance due to land cover change. This paper presents new albedo look-up maps (LUM) using a multi-scale hierarchical approach based on MODIS BRDF/albedo products and Landsat imagery. Ten years (2001-2011) of MODIS BRDF/albedo products were used to generate global albedo climatology.

Understanding factors that drive the choice of breeding habitats for birds is important for species management and conservation. We addressed this question in the case of the European Roller Coracias garrulus, an endangered species listed in Annex I of the European Union directive for bird conservation. For secondary hole-nesting birds, such as rollers, the breeding micro- and macrohabitat selection may rely on the location of the nest hole in a tree and its immediate surrounding environment as well as the larger scale foraging habitat.

CONTEXT: The loss of landscape heterogeneity is causing declines of farmland biodiversity around the world. Traditional farmland regions are often highly heterogeneous and harbor high biodiversity, but are under threat of land cover homogenization due to changing agricultural practices. One species potentially affected by landscape homogenization is the Corncrake (Crex crex), which is threatened in Western Europe but remains widespread in the traditional farmland regions of Eastern Europe.

CONTEXT: Insect species of different trophic level will respond differently to landscape configuration. OBJECTIVE: In this context we explore the way landscape structure affects the distribution and abundance of the whitefly Siphoninus phillyreae and its predator Clitostethus arcuatus in olive orchards. METHODS: Adult individuals of these two species were collected using sticky traps placed in 12 olive host patches in Argentina. Host patches were detected and quantified using Landsat 5 TM images. Different landscape metrics were estimated for the study area land covers.

Rapid development of shrimp farming may lead to unrecognized and undesirable changes of land cover/land use patterns in coastal areas. Of special concern is the loss of mangrove forest in coastal areas such as Quang Ninh, Vietnam, which is adjacent to the World Heritage-listed Ha Long Bay. Understanding the status and changes of land cover/land use for coastal shrimp farms and mangrove forests can support environmental protection and decision-making for sustainable development in coastal areas.

Soil erosion is one of the major threats to the conservation of soil and water resources in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region (DRR), China. In order to describe the areas with high soil erosion risk (SER) and to develop adequate erosion prevention measures, SER in the DRR was assessed by integrating the CORINE model with GIS and RS.

The Persian Long-tailed Desert Lizard, Mesalina watsonana , is one of the most common and most widely distributed lizards on the Iranian Plateau extending from Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The species is frequently encountered in various types of habitats. We collected over 600 distributional records from available literature, museum collections, and our own field work and used bioclimatic and land cover characteristics to develop a model of potential distribution for M. watsonana . According to the model, the most important factors limiting the distribution of M.

The initial step in most object-based classification methodologies is the application of a segmentation algorithm to define objects. In the context of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image analysis, the presence of speckle noise might hamper the segmentation quality. The aim of this study is to assess the segmentation performance of SAR images when no filter or different filters are applied before segmentation.

Moderate-grained data may not always represent landscape structure in adequate detail which could cause misleading results. Certain metrics have been shown to be predictable with changes in scale; however, no studies have verified such predictions using independent fine-grained data.Our objective was to use independently derived land cover datasets to assess relationships between metrics based on fine- and moderate-grained data for a range of analysis extents.