Changing environmental and socio-economic conditions make land degradation, a major concern in Central and East Asia. Globally satellite imagery, particularly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, has proved an effective tool for monitoring land cover change. This study examines 33 grassland water points using vegetation field studies and remote sensing techniques to track desertification on the Mongolian plateau.

Characterisation and mapping of land cover/land use within forest areas over long-multitemporal intervals is a complex task. This complexity is mainly due to the location and extent of such areas and, as a consequence, to the lack of full continuous cloud-free coverage of those large regions by one single remote sensing instrument. In order to provide improved long-multitemporal forest change detection using Landsat MSS and ETM + in part of Mt.

Sustainability indicator systems often use administrative entities as a reference, which may cause over- or underestimations of results within topographically different regions. Within the European Alps the highest impacts due to human activities are concentrated below the potential treeline, making these zones comparable to the potentially highly impacted surroundings of the European Alps. An application of the area below the potential treeline as a reference unit for sustainability indicators allows for a more equitable comparison of the European Alps and their surroundings.

Landscape networks and ecosystems worldwide are undergoing changes that may impact in different ways relevant ecological processes such as gene flow, pollination, or wildlife dispersal. A myriad of indices have been developed to characterize landscape patterns, but not all of them are equally suited to evaluate temporal changes in landscape connectivity as is increasingly needed for biodiversity monitoring and operational indicator delivery.

Herbaceous biomass, harvested and handled as hay, has potential for bioenergy production. In the Upper Southeast, fields that cannot be competitively managed to produce another crop can produce an acceptable yield of switchgrass. Using a delayed harvest (crop is allowed to dry standing in the field), switchgrass can be harvested from production fields over a 6-month period. This gives a significant advantage over a crop residue, like corn stover, which is collected over a 5-week harvest season in the Midwest. The Southeast has the potential to be a major bioenergy production region.

Water consumed through evapotranspiration (ET) impacts local and regional hydrologic regimes on various spatial and temporal scales. Estimating ET in the Great Plains is a prerequisite for effective regional water resource management of the Ogallala (High Plains) Aquifer, which supplies vital water resources in the form of irrigation for extensive agricultural production.

China is the most populated country in the world with slightly more than half of the population is still living in rural areas. In the past couple of decades, rapid urbanization and industrialization have significantly changed the land use/land cover (LULC) pattern in rural areas, particularly those around the big cities in eastern China. Shandong Peninsula, a traditional agriculture area, also has witnessed rapid urbanization and industrialization.

A software application for automatic descriptive feature extraction from image-objects, FETEX 2.0, is presented and described in this paper. The input data include a multispectral high resolution digital image and a vector file in shapefile format containing the polygons or objects, usually extracted from a geospatial database.

In-depth statistical analysis of forest transition between land-cover types over time can reveal the dominant signals of landscape transformation, which are needed in order to develop appropriate land management strategies. We applied a recently developed methodology to analyse the transition matrix of six land-cover classes, derived from 1986 and 2002 Landsat images of an area of 15 675 km² in southern Burkina Faso. Results show that most landscape transformations followed a systematic process.

Ecosystems provide multiple benefits to people, including climate regulation. Previous efforts to quantify this ecosystem service have been either largely conceptual or based on complex atmospheric models. Here, we review previous research on this topic and propose a new and simple analytical approach for estimating the physical regulation of climate by ecosystems. The proposed metric estimates how land‐cover change affects the loading of heat and moisture into the atmosphere, while also accounting for the relative contribution of wind‐transported heat and moisture.

Recent European research projects have developed approaches that downscale land use related results of economic models. These results are primarily downscaled from the national or regional scale to a spatial resolution appropriate for environmental impact analysis. Different studies represent the interactions between the economic and geographic components of the land system in different ways. This paper explores how interactions between economic and geographic aspects of the land system can be strengthened in modelling studies.