Expanding human population and economic growth have led to large-scale conversion of natural habitat to human-dominated landscapes with consequent large-scale declines in biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity, while at the same time meeting expanding human needs, is an issue of utmost importance. In this paper we develop a spatially explicit landscape-level model for analyzing the biological and economic consequences of alternative land-use patterns.

Site degradation occurs mainly through deterioration of the soil's capacity to capture and store water, as well as the loss of organic matter or the accumulation of salts or other toxic substances in the soil. This degradation process, leading to the reduction of the biotic potential of the site, is known as desertification. In this study, changes in bulk density, organic matter, and electrical conductivity are used as indicators of desertification in northeast Mexico.

The main goal of agricultural management practices in irrigated agroecosystems in the Brazilian semi-arid is either to maintain or increase soil quality. In these areas, the reduction in soil quality is mainly associated with depletion of soil organic matter (SOM), as well as of soil phosphorus (P) reserves. We aimed to evaluate changes in SOM and P fractions of a eutrophic haplic cambisol (Eutric Cambisol) under different uses and management systems in the irrigated perimeter of Jaguaribe/Apodi in Ceará State, Brazil.

This paper explores the concept of homegardens and their potential functions as strategic elements in land-use planning, and adaptation and mitigation to climate change in Sri Lanka.

Unprecedented land use and land cover (LULC) changes in the Gilgel Tekeze catchment of the upper Nile River basin in Ethiopia may have far-reaching consequences for the long-term sustainability of the natural resources base. This study analyzed the dynamics and hydrologic effects of LULC changes between 1976 and 2003 as shown in satellite imagery. The effects of these LULC changes on the hydrologic response were investigated using the WetSpa model to estimate spatially distributed average annual evapotranspiration, surface runoff, and groundwater recharge.

Agricultural land values and cash rental rates in South Dakota, by region and by state, are primary topics of this report. The target audience are farmers and ranchers, landowners, ag professional (lenders, rural appraisers, professional farm managers), and policy makers interested in ag land market trends. This report contains results of the 2010 Farm Real Estate Market Survey, the 20th annual SDSU survey developed to estimate ag land values and cash rental rates by land use in different regions of South Dakota.

This research was conducted in order to assess the environmental impacts of Finchaa irrigation project using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Because of the limited resources only some environmental parameters were selected. These parameters are natural vegetation, soil/land, water quality, climate and health conditions. The normalized vegetation index (NDVI) analysis was used to detect the spatial and temporal change of vegetation biomass in the study area. The result indicated that the natural vegetation biomass is declining.

Understanding soil processes is fundamental to the success of forest restoration programs. We compared different types of soils in Mediterranean mountain forests with respect to their edaphic environments and influence of vegetation cover and lithology. We then used this information to determine the suitability of current forest restoration programs in these ecosystems.

Land management in tropical woodlands is being used to sequester carbon (C), alleviate poverty and protect biodiversity, among other benefits. Our objective was to determine how slash-and-burn agriculture affected vegetation and soil C stocks and biodiversity on an area of miombo woodland in Mozambique, and how C stocks and biodiversity responded once agriculture was abandoned.

Improved change vector analysis (ICVA) has recently been promoted as an effective algorithm for multi-class change detection. Unlike the conventional change vector analysis (CVA) that works on two-dimensional data, the ICVA works on multidimensional data. However, ICVA has limitations when the change vector is fraught with similar direction cosine values. In this article, a new algorithm, named median change vector analysis (MCVA) has been proposed for multi-class change detection.

This article introduces an innovative approach using marker-controlled watershed segmentation (WS) in the Vegetation–Impervious Surface–Soil (V–I–S) feature space for urban land-use and land-cover (LULC) classification. The complement (e.g., the inverse) of the V–I–S feature space image shows depressions, which can be treated as topographic watersheds and they correspond to LULC classes. WS partitions the complement of V–I–S feature space image into LULC regions based on user-specified initial markers.