In urban areas, the competition between land development and ecological conservation is intense. To mitigate the negative effects of urbanization, we developed a methodology to plan a spatially explicit conservation network based on widely available remotely sensed data and other auxiliary data. First, as an area of strategic significance for the conservation of regional flora and fauna and for maintaining high environmental quality to promote human well-being, the remaining natural and semi-natural areas were identified as ecologically primary areas.

Urbanization in China accompanies economic development and population growth. Changes in land use leads to changes in both meteorological and chemical fields. In this study, the impact of land use change in Jing-Jin-Ji (JJJ, indicating Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei) and Yangtze River Delta (YRD) areas on meteorology and ozone concentrations are studied using the WRF–Chem model. Land use change is represented by two different land cover data sets: USGS and MODIS.

Human-induced soil degradation is a serious and complex environmental challenge in Iran. For a long time, human activities, namely the overuse of land, have been influencing the natural processes on and in soils; therefore, various types of soil degradation can be observed in many parts of the country. The understanding and the consideration of direct and indirect effects of human activities on soils are indispensable for the prediction of the human impact on soil degradation processes.

We exploited publicly available satellite- and aircraft-based imagery to estimate urban vegetation cover fraction and land use by class for a semiarid urban area that includes Phoenix, AZ, USA, using low-cost and technologically modest tools. This technique is also used to evaluate two satellite-derived tree cover datasets as well as to compare estimates from the present study with land cover data generated from another study performed using the same study domain.

Human activity is one of the most important aerosol sources. Because the underlaying surface feature records most human activities, it is important to recognize the correlation between aerosol distribution and the underlaying surface.

Most impacts on providing ecosystem services (ESs) are related to land use changes that may cause ecosystem fragmentation and loss of ecosystem functions. Spatial planning, focusing on sustainable landscape development, should consider the local potential for providing ESs as well possible impacts due to land use changes. The results of a large number of recent studies on ES assessment are difficult to replicate and integrate into landscape planning or definition of land use policies.

Changes in land use and land tenure can influence both physical fragmentation and ownership fragmentation of landscapes, with implications for biodiversity. In this study, we evaluated changes in land use and land tenure in the Tijuana River Watershed, a region of high biodiversity and endemism, following the implementation of a new Agrarian Law which allowed for privatization and sales of communal land (ejidos) beginning in 1992. In order to understand changes in land use and cover, we constructed maps from aerial photographs and Aster images and measured changes between 1994 and 2005.

The structural characteristics of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data are increasingly used to classify urban environments at fine scales, but have been underutilized for distinguishing heterogeneous land covers over large urban regions due to high cost, limited spectral information, and the computational difficulties posed by inherently large data volumes.

Based on the same data source of Landsat TM/ETM+ in 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, all urban built-up areas in China are mapped mainly by human interpretation. Mapping results were checked and refined by the same analyst with the same set of criteria. The results show during the last 20 years urban areas in China have increased exponentially more than 2 times. The greatest area of urbanization changed from Northeastern provinces in 1990s to the Southeast coast of China in Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, and Zhejiang in 2010s. Urban areas are mostly converted from croplands in China.

The rapid growth of urban population in India is a cause of concern among country’s urban and town planners for efficient urban planning. The drastic growth of urban areas has resulted in sharp land use and land cover changes. In recent years, the significance of spatial data technologies, especially the application of remotely sensed data and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used. The present study investigates the urban growth of Tiruchirapalli city, Tamilnadu using IRS satellite data for the years 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010.

The dissected volcanic terrains around Limbe, SW Cameroon are frequently affected by small scale but destructive landslides. In this study, a raster-based data driven method involving seed cells is used to build a landslide susceptibility model for the Limbe area. Factors considered to be potential controls of slope failure within this area include slope gradient, rock type, distance from roads, slope orientation, mean annual precipitation, soil type, land cover type, stream density and distance from stream.

Based on the theoretical framework, in this article we demonstrate how Decision Network can be used to formulate the inventory approach to urban growth boundaries (UGBs) as an application of the planning tool to a general case. In particular, in the inventory approach expansions of UGBs are considered as decision situations, land consumptions as problems, and order sizes of UGBs as solutions. We compare the time- and event-driven systems of the inventory control problem based on the decision network framework.