The Simple Biosphere Model (SiB2) and the 2 × 2 km resolution National Land use/Land Cover database were used to investigate the effects of Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) on land surface energy balance and climate in Jilin Province, northeast China, from 1990 to 2005. The spatial patterns of the components of surface energy balance (i.e., net radiation (R ₙ), latent heat (LH), sensible heat (SH), and albedo (α)) and climate (i.e., canopy temperature (T c), diurnal temperature range (DTR)), as well as the roles of land cover type in variations of energy balance and climate, were investigated.

Impacts of rural land development on natural resources in the United States have been well documented and research on rural land development provides important inputs to land conservation policy and program development. Although numerous land-use studies have been completed for the western and eastern states, still lacking is a single study examining changes in population, housing, and land development in the two regions.

Temporal variations in land-atmosphere water vapor exchange are more pronounced in seasonal environments, especially grass-dominated savannas (known as campo sujo Cerrado) of the southern and eastern Amazon Basin. Recent work in campo sujo indicates that rates of canopy conductance (gc) were directly and indirectly affected by a variety of meteorological variables, which limited our understanding of how seasonal variation in meteorology affected rates of gc. Thus, our overall objective here is to determine how individual meteorological variables affect seasonal variations in gc.

An optimized artificial immune network-based classification model, namely OPTINC, was developed for remote sensing-based land use/land cover (LULC) classification.

Transferable development rights (TDRs) can be used as a local planning tool to preserve land for particular uses. TDRs separate ownership of the right to develop land from ownership of the land itself, creating a market in which the development rights can be bought and sold. Landowners who sell TDRs permanently preserve their land in an undeveloped state; those TDRs are then used to increase the density of development elsewhere. In this paper, we evaluate a TDR program for preserving farmland in Calvert County, Maryland.

Habitat specialists living in metapopulations are sensitive to habitat fragmentation. In most studies, the effects of fragmentation on such species are analyzed based on Euclidean inter-patch distances. This approach, however, ignores the role of the landscape matrix. Recently, therefore, functional distances that account for the composition of the landscape surrounding the habitat patches have been used more frequently as indicators for patch occupancy.

This work evaluates the changes of nitrate-nitrogen (NO₃-N), ammonium-nitrogen (NH₄-N), total phosphorus (P) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentrations in stream waters as related to the land use/land cover (LULC) alterations within eight small (5–39� km²) tile-drained catchments in the southern part of The Czech Republic in the period 1993–2010, when massive grassing of arable land took place. The robust tools of seasonal Mann–Kendall trend test and LOcally WEighted Scatterplot Smoothing methods were employed to reveal trends of the monitored parameters with adjustment to hydrology.

We explore and compare quantities and patterns of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) in protected forest and neighboring land around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (a mountain protected area in Southwestern Uganda). We assessed paired sites of natural forest and major land uses (potato, tea and grazing lands) converted between 1973 and 2010. These pairings were replicated at three altitudinal zones. Plots (20m by 50m) were demarcated within each site. Five composite soil and core samples were obtained from 0 to 15cm (top-soil) and 15–30cm (sub-soil) at each plot.

In arid and semiarid regions that have deep soils, plant root systems can extract soil water to a depth of 20m or more. An accurate evaluation of soil water conditions in such regions is essential in order to improve the understanding of the role of soils as a water pool and to design scientifically based water management strategies. However, the vertical distribution of soil water and its storage in deeper layers are unclear due to the shortage of field data.

Recognized as one of the richest and most extensive savannas in the world, the Cerrado region, the second largest biome in South America, presents an intense and continuous human-induced land-cover change, which has already affected around 40% of its original area. In the pursuit of orientation and planning for current and long-term occupation, in this work we present plausible deforestation scenarios for the entire Cerrado biome, to 2050.

Accurate built-up information is imperative for loss estimation and disaster management after the occurrence of catastrophic events such as earthquake, tornado, tsunami and flood. These catastrophic events leave behind a trail of mass destruction with property and human losses amounting to millions. Once a natural disaster hits a region, built-up information is required within a short span of time for disaster management. Nowadays, earth observation satellite imagery serves as a promising source to extract the land use / land cover classes.