The patterns of urban sprawl over a 20-year period presented in the study indicate unplanned development in the urban agglomerations of Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Dhanbad. The visual interpretation of Landsat (1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001) and IRS-P6 (2005) was used to map land use/land cover and analyse urban sprawl. The saturation of urban areas within municipal limits, along with pressure from the growing population, resulted in the densification of the core urban areas within Dhanbad and Jamshedpur.

After the industrial revolution, urban growth has been increasing, especially with technological advances. Urbanization is accelerating environmental pollution and also affects climate significantly because of land use or land cover changes. In this study, the Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) model developed by the United States Environment Protection Agency (USEPA) is used for modeling the impervious areas of Eskişehir which is located in the Porsuk Stream Watershed in Inner Anatolia, Turkey.

In this study, a multi-scale approach was used for classifying land cover in a high resolution image of an urban area. Pixels and image segments were assigned the spectral, texture, size, and shape information of their super-objects (i.e. the segments that they are located within) from coarser segmentations of the same scene, and this set of super-object information was used as additional input data for image classification.

A growing trend towards increased urbanization emphasizes the role of suburban parks in wildlife conservation. Spatial planning aimed at maintaining biological diversity and functionality must consider how changes at landscape and more local scales will influence the biotic structure of urban areas. From May 2006 to July 2010, bird surveys were conducted in three metropolitan parks in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

Developing conservation strategies for threatened species increasingly requires understanding vulnerabilities to climate change, in terms of both demographic sensitivities to climatic and other environmental factors, and exposure to variability in those factors over time and space. We conducted a range‐wide, spatially explicit climate change vulnerability assessment for Eastern Massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus), a declining endemic species in a region showing strong environmental change.

Heavy metal pollution in urban soil has become a serious environmental issue in China since the last three decades. Attention has been given to the investigation of soil contamination; however, there is little information available on the variation of heavy metal pollution in soils. To resolve this problem and provide references on similar regions, 18 topsoil (0∼20 cm) samples were collected from identical sites of districts that with different functions in Kaifeng City in 1994 and 2012. Total contents of As, Cd, Hg, and Pb were determined by standard methods.

Uncontrolled spatiotemporal changes in large urban areas can produce several problems such as environmental pollution, diminishing valuable agricultural lands; irregular industrialization and urbanization due to number and proportion of residents continue to increase.

An improved Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach (CASA) model based on two kinds of remote sensing (RS) data, Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM +) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS), and climate variables were applied to estimate the Net Primary Productivity (NPP) of Xuzhou in June of each year from 2001 to 2010. The NPP of the study area decreased as the spatial scale increased. The average NPP of terrestrial vegetation in Xuzhou showed a decreasing trend in recent years, likely due to changes in climate and environment.

This survey concerns the urban coastal environment of Glyfada. Due to its wonderful natural resources, the area has been chosen for residence, business, tourism as well as recreation and entertainment. However, these natural resources are threatened by degradation due to an increasing intensity of land uses and various policies that have been implemented. The survey focuses on the problems this area faces and the possibilities to maintain or increase the quality of natural resources.

Land-use and land-cover change profoundly affect human well-being and, therefore, have become a major topic for society. A thorough understanding of past and present processes transforming landscapes is essential for guiding future developments toward the sustained provision of the ecosystem services humans critically depend upon. Drawing on the driving forces and resilience frameworks, we identify possible variables and patterns of land change, connecting them to empirical findings in three case study areas in the Swabian Alb region, southwestern Germany.