Off-road military vehicle traffic is a major consideration in the management of military lands. The objective of this study was to determine the impacts of military tracked M1A1 heavy combat tank vehicles on sediment loss from runoff, surface plant cover, and surface microtopography in a desert military training environment. A randomized block design was used which had 10 blocks with 4 plots (0.5 m2) in each block.

The Ethiopian Rift Valley is a dry land zone where for a long time pastoral communities have made their living from acacia-based woodlands. But many pastoralists have changed from a pastoral way of life to mixed farming over time. The aim of this study was to evaluate land-use and land cover (LULC) changes in the Central Rift Valley dry lands of Ethiopia, and determine the role of drought vulnerability as a driver. A combination of GIS/remote sensing techniques, drought vulnerability analyses, field observation and surveying were employed.

Supporters of the effort to link cleanups at hazardous waste sites to the sites' expected land uses claim that amending language in the federal Superfund statute to allow this may yield a number of benefits. These include rationalizing the cleanup process and decreasing cleanup costs, promoting economic development in the local communities that host Superfund sites, and helping such communities exercise more control over the cleanups. However, interviews with Superfund stakeholders and a detailed case study call into question these arguments.

This study determined the effects of land-use practice had on the rate and extent of bush encroachment in a mesic savanna in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Changes in woody cover were measured for 1 km² sites in areas under communal, commercial and conservation land-use systems for the period between 1937 and 2000. Land users from each area were interviewed to gain the histories of each area and to determine how the changes in woody cover had impacted them and whether anything was being done to counteract the spread of trees and shrubs on their land.

This paper assesses strategic water availability and use under different development pathways on a basin scale using remote sensing (RS), geographical information systems (GIS) and a spatial water budget model (SWBM). The SWBM was applied to the Upper Ing Basin in northern Thailand to investigate the spatial and temporal variations in the location of streams and water yields from different parts of the basin. The base simulation was carried out for the years 1998–2007 using a DEM and actual land-use data at 100-m resolution.

This article explores the development of the social metabolism of Czech agriculture over the past 80 years and aims to describe the complex agricultural system from a biophysical perspective. As a Central European country, the Czech Republic's political system has experienced a number of turning points and changes in its history. Using the social metabolism concept and the material and energy flow method of analysis this article looks at the system from a biophysical perspective and explores the interactions between the economic system and nature.

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil. It has also received considerable attention from environmental and social non-governmental organizations as a driver of deforestation and land consolidation. While many researchers have examined the impacts of soybean production on human and environmental landscapes, there has been little investigation into the economic and institutional context of Brazilian soybean production or the relationship between soy yields and planted area.

Widespread anthropogenic land-cover change over the last five centuries has influenced the global climate system through both biogeochemical and biophysical processes. Models indicate that warming from carbon emissions associated with land cover conversion have been partially offset if not outweighed by cooling from elevated albedo, but considerable uncertainty remains partly because of uncertainty in model treatments of albedo.

Land use and management practices may influence plant C inputs and soil CO2 emission. We evaluated the effect of a combination of irrigation, tillage, cropping system, and N fertilization on plant biomass C, soil temperature and water content at the 0- to 15-cm depth, and CO2 emission in a sandy loam soil from April to October, 2006 to 2008, in western North Dakota.

Urbanization effects on ecosystem functions are both important and complex, characterized by scale multiplicity, spatial heterogeneity, and intensive human disturbances. Integrating the hierarchical structure of urban landscape pattern with ecosystem processes through simulation modeling can facilitate our understanding of human–environment interactions in urban environment.

Texture in high resolution satellite images requires substantial improvement in the conventional segmentation algorithms. The use of wavelet packet transforms for texture analysis and image classification of high spatial resolution LISS IV imagery provide more details about the urban areas. This paper analyses the performance of a combination of Wavelet Packet Statistical Features (WPSFs) and Wavelet Packet Co-occurrence Features (WPCFs) for the classification of LISS IV images. The classification accuracy per pixel is improved in this paper by varying the window size.