Effectively identifying soil properties in relation to non-point source (NPS) phosphorus pollution is important for NPS pollution management. Previous studies have focused on particulate P loads in relation to agricultural non-point source pollution. In areas undergoing rapid urbanization, dissolved P loads may be important with respect to conditions of surface infiltration and rainfall runoff. The present study developed an integrated model for the analysis of both dissolved P and particulate P loads, applied to the Meiliang Bay watershed, Taihu Lake, China.

Land use/land cover changes (LULCCs) represent the result of the complex interaction between biophysical factors and human activity, acting over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. The aim of this work is to quantify the role of biophysical factors in constraining the trajectories of land abandonment and urbanization in the last 50 years.

Building extraction from remote sensing images is very important in many fields, such as urban planning, land use investigation, damage assessment, and so on. In polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery, the buildings not only have typical polarimetric features but also have rich texture features. In this paper, the texture information is introduced to improve the accuracy of urban building extraction from PolSAR imagery by a new method called cross reclassification .

In much of the United States and elsewhere, urbanization continues to transform landscapes. In central Texas, anthropogenic conversion of land is due in part to a rapidly growing population in the Austin and San Antonio metro areas and the subsequent infrastructure and resources needed to support that growth. Protected natural areas adjacent to urbanized landscapes are often intended to mitigate the impact of land development by serving as wildlife habitat.

The increase of global urbanization can have effects on wildlife species, including carnivores such as coyotes (Canis latrans). As coyotes continue to settle in more urban areas, reports of human-coyote conflicts, such as attacks on humans or pets, may also increase. Understanding environmental variables that might influence whether or not coyotes and human-coyote conflicts will occur in certain urban areas may assist wildlife officials in creating management plans for urban wildlife.

Rapid urbanization has induced numerous ecological and environmental issues seriously threatening the ecological security. The ecological security pattern (ESP), an effective way for protecting the ecological security, is becoming increasingly important in reconciling the rapid urbanization and ecology protection in urban planning practices.

The climate warming trend and city growth contribute to the generation of excessive heat in urban areas. This could be reduced by introducing vegetation and open water surfaces in urban design. This study evaluates the cooling efficiency of green and blue infrastructure to reduce urban heat load using a set of idealized case simulations and a real city model application for Vienna. The idealized case simulations show that the cooling effect of green and blue infrastructure is dependent on the building type, time of the day and in case of blue infrastructure, the water temperature.

Rapid and far-reaching development transition has triggered corresponding restructuring in rural China especially since the turn of the new millennium. Recently, there has been an increasing trend emphasizing regional resources in formulating rural development policy and restructuring rural areas. This paper analyzes the rural restructuring in China affected by the allocation and management of critical resources including human resource, land resource and capital, by establishing a theoretical framework of “elements-structure-function” of rural territorial system.

In this study, the impact of different urban development scenarios on neighbourhood climate are examined. The investigation considers the relative impact differing policy/planning choices will have on the local-scale climate across a city during a typical climatological year (TCY). The aim is to demonstrate a modelling approach which couples a climate-based land classification and simple urban climate model and how this can be used to examine the impact differing urban forms and design strategies have on neighbourhood scale partitioning of energy and resulting consequences.

The urbanization of watersheds is a highly dynamic global phenomenon that must be monitored. With consequences for the environment, the population, and the economy, accurate products at adequate spatial and temporal resolutions are required and demanded by the science community and stakeholders alike. To address these needs, a new Impervious Surface Area (ISA) product was created for a Portuguese Watershed (Mondego river) from Landsat data (a combination of leaf-on multispectral bands, derived products, and NDVI time series), using Regression Tree Models (RTM).

CONTEXT: Golden-cheeked warblers (Setophaga chrysoparia), an endangered wood-warbler, breed exclusively in woodlands co-dominated by Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei) in central Texas. Their breeding range is becoming increasingly urbanized and habitat loss and fragmentation are a main threat to the species’ viability. OBJECTIVES: We investigated the effects of remotely sensed local habitat and landscape attributes on point occupancy and density of warblers in an urban preserve and produced a spatially explicit density map for the preserve using model-supported relationships.

The proliferation of artificial lighting at night is one of the key anthropogenic changes associated with urbanised areas as well as some non-urban areas. Disruption to natural light/dark regimes can have considerable effects on the timing of different behaviours of birds, particularly during the breeding season. However, the effect of artificial lights on the timing of behaviours during winter has received relatively little attention, despite the fact that time partitioning of foraging can have implications for avian winter survival.