The present study examines the long-term effects of land use/land cover (LULC) changes in Rajasthan state, India on land-atmosphere fluxes and, possibly in precipitation and aerosol loading. By comparing the satellite observations from Landsat MSS (1972–73) and IRS-P6 AWiFS (2006–07) considerable LULC changes are observed, an increase in crop-land and vegetated areas of ∼57% in the eastern and ∼68% in the western Rajasthan.

Using remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS), the detection of land cover/landuse (LC/LU) spaceies and monitoring changes in particular periods are made easily and economically. CORINE classification was developed in 1985 by countries of the Europeon Union to establish a good harmony especialy with LC/LU classification. This system contains three levels of classification. So far, LC/LU classification has not been fullfilled using large scale CORINE classification in Turkey,.

Vegetation indices are widely employed to evaluate wetland ecological condition, and are expected to provide sensitive and specific detection of environmental change. Most studies evaluate the performance of condition assessment metrics in the context of the data used to calibrate them. Here we examined the temporal stability of the Florida Wetland Condition Index (FWCI) for vegetation of depressional forested wetlands by resampling sites in 2008 that were previously sampled to develop the FWCI in 2001.

The performance improvement obtained from the use of trackers in a PV system cannot be separated from the higher requirement of land due to the mutual shadows between generators. Thus, the optimal choice of distances between trackers is a compromise between productivity and land use to minimize the cost of the energy produced by the PV system during its lifetime. This paper develops a method for the estimation and optimization of the cost of energy function.

It has been widely accepted that high land use intensity contributes to sandy desertification in Northern China. However, it is surprising that it is even not easy to find an explicit definition and proper indicator for the term “land use intensity” in the sandy desertification related literatures.

This paper presents an illustrated guide to the identification of non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) preserved in lake-sediment archives from equatorial East Africa. Modern NPPs were recovered from recently deposited surface sediment in 20 small crater lakes in western Uganda, located along environmental gradients of vegetation (moist evergreen and semi-deciduous forest, wooded and open grass savannah), land use (pastoralism, crop agriculture, plantations) and lake characteristics (basin morphometry, water chemistry and aquatic production).

Conservation auctions are used by public agencies to procure environmental friendly land uses from private landowners. We present the structure of an iterative conservation auction that ranks bids according to a scoring rule intended to procure spatially adjacent conservation land use projects. Laboratory experiments are conducted to compare the performance of this auction under two information conditions. Under one condition subjects have knowledge about the spatial goal implemented by the scoring rule and in the other case they don’t.

Given the potential impacts of land cover changes on surface processes, accurate mapping of landscape dynamics is a crucial task in environmental monitoring. The use of commercial software for remote sensing of landscape changes requires appropriate expertise in sensor technology and computing resources that are not always available to decision makers. This paper presents the development of an experimental prototype of a lightweight and user-friendly GIS tool – ES4LUCC – a semiautomatic software for change detection and classification of land use/cover.

Analyses of the impact of European policies on agricultural change are most often based on agricultural sector models. Such models have their limitations: they cannot specify the interaction between agriculture and the rest of the economy, and their spatial dimension is usually limited. Land use simulation models, on the other hand, usually depend on other models for assessing the demand for land. The consistency of those models with the assumptions and databases of the land use model is often not examined.

Local governments in the United States use a wide range of tools to preserve rural landscapes. Some of these tools, like the purchase or transfer of development rights, are generally welcomed by farmers and other large landowners. Other tools, like increasing the minimum lot size in a town’s agricultural zone, are more controversial because they are believed to have negative effects on landowner wealth.

Frequent human activities and climate change in the karst region of southwest China since the 1950s have led to the investigation of response of runoff to climate and catchment properties. Runoff coefficient (Rc) as an expression variable of the catchment response to rainfall is important to describe runoff dynamics and to estimate available streamflow for utilization. In this study, the equations of Rc associated with its attributors of climate condition and catchment property were derived using the Budyko framework.

Koiliaris River watershed is a Critical Zone Observatory that represents severely degraded soils due to intensive agricultural activities and biophysical factors. It has typical Mediterranean soils under the imminent threat of desertification which is expected to intensify due to projected climate change. High frequency hydro-chemical monitoring with targeted sampling for Rare Earth Elements (REE) analysis of different water bodies and geochemical characterization of soils were used for the identification of hydrologic and geochemical pathways.