Central and Eastern Europe is experiencing significant land degradation, at the same time as social, economic and political transformation, and within the broader context of global climate change. This paper uses satellite data, primary field data and secondary information on Romania's social, political and economic dynamics, in a mixed‐method case study analysis of the drivers of, and responses to, environmental change and land degradation over the period 1984–2007.

Effective ecological monitoring is imperative in a human-dominated world, as our ability to manage functioning ecosystems will depend on understanding biodiversity responses to anthropogenic impacts. Yet, most monitoring efforts have either been narrowly focused on particular sites, species and stressors — thus inadequately considering the cumulative effects of multiple, interacting impacts at scales of management relevance — or too unfocused to provide specific guidance.

Land use and land cover change (LUCC) can modify the physical and thermodynamic characteristics of the land surface, including surface roughness, albedo, and vegetation fraction, among others. These direct changes can result in a series of impacts on regional climate. In this paper, the simulated results over China under the scenario of LUCC using weather research and forecasting model are presented. The period for the simulation is from December 2006 to December 2011. Two experiments are initialized by the LUCC datasets derived from the MODIS data of 2001 and 2008, respectively.

Land is the basic resource that is needed by man in order to survive: It provides humans with living space, nutrition and energy resources. The rapid growth of the human population, climate change and pollution on a catastrophic scale has caused the quality of land resources to be compromised. Remote sensing is a useful tool in land cover change detection providing information to decision makers.

The homegardens represent an important component of the trees outside forests (TOF) in the rural ecosystem which fulfill a range of subsistence and economic needs besides providing many environmental services. The present work was focused on the identification and mapping of rural homegardens as a component of the trees outside forests in the larger landscape of the three districts—Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj, of Barak Valley, Assam, northeast India.

Ireland provides a unique setting for the study of past climates, as its climate is dominated by westerly airflow from the North Atlantic and readily responsive to changes in North Atlantic circulation patterns. Although there has been substantial research on Ireland’s past environments, quantitative palaeolimnological research, especially chironomid-based research, has been lacking. In order to further develop chironomid-based palaeolimnological investigations, a calibration set was constructed to determine the dominant environmental controls on modern chironomids in western Ireland.

We can effectively monitor soil condition—and develop sound policies to offset the emissions of greenhouse gases—only with accurate data from which to define baselines. Currently, estimates of soil organic C for countries or continents are either unavailable or largely uncertain because they are derived from sparse data, with large gaps over many areas of the Earth. Here, we derive spatially explicit estimates, and their uncertainty, of the distribution and stock of organic C in the soil of Australia.

Conservation programs often manage populations indirectly through the landscapes in which they live. Empirically, linking reproductive success with landscape structure and anthropogenic change is a first step in understanding and managing the spatial mechanisms that affect reproduction, but this link is not sufficiently informed by data. Hierarchical multistate occupancy models can forge these links by estimating spatial patterns of reproductive success across landscapes.

During the communist regime, Romania’s planned economy focused exclusively on production neglecting the environment protection. The lack of less polluting production technologies and of environmental protection measures led to excessive pollution in certain industrialized areas. This is the case of the town of Copsa Mica in Sibiu County, which in 1987 was considered one of the most polluted towns in Europe.

Four upscaling methods for estimating daytime actual evapotranspiration (ET) from single time-of-day snapshots, as commonly retrieved using remote sensing, were compared. These methods assume self-preservation of the ratio between ET and a given reference variable over the daytime hours. The analysis was performed using eddy covariance data collected at 12 AmeriFlux towers, sampling a fairly wide range in climatic and land cover conditions. The choice of energy budget closure method significantly impacted performance using different scaling methodologies.

Land use and cover changes trigger multi-factorial responses with tangible and intangible effects. Driving forces governing changes are scale-, place- and time-dependent; because of their complexity, a multi-scalar analysis is required to determine conjoint causation. Studies using multi-scalar approach in semiarid scrubland ecosystems are scanty. This paper investigates land use changes on the largest semiarid scrubland ecosystem of Mexico, the Baja California Peninsula, using a multi-scalar analysis approach.

The aim of this research was to present the land cover structure and landscape diversity in the West Polesie Biosphere Reserve. The land cover classification was performed using Object Based Image Analysis in Trimble eCognition Developer 8 software.