SUMMARY One of the main parameter for urban heat island mapping is the land cover information. Satellite data were used to map the land cover over the study area, CyberJaya. Remotely sensed data were processed using pixel based and object based image processing techniques. Most traditional classification approaches are based exclusively on the digital number of the pixel itself. Thereby only th...

Similar land-use types usually have similar soil properties, and, most likely, similar microbial communities. Here, we assessed whether land-use types or soil chemical properties are the primary drivers of soil microbial community composition, and how changes in one part of the ecosystem affect another. We applied Ion Torrent sequencing to the bacterial and fungal communities of five different ...

[1] The hydrological regime of the Rhine basin is expected to shift from a combined snowmelt-rainfall regime to a more rainfall-dominated regime because of climate change, leading to more extreme flood peaks and low flows. Land use changes may reinforce the effects of this shift through urbanization or may counteract them through, for example, afforestation. In this study, we investigate the ef...

Iberus gualtieranus gualtieranus is an arid-dwelling land snail that needs to use karstic fissures as refuge in order to survive in arid environments. Karstic fissures are primarily on vertical rocky walls. Because displacement is costly to terrestrial gastropods, it is predictable that this snail will move on vertical substrates near its refuges. However, this species eats primarily phanerogam...

The specific bio-species and their spatial patterns play crucial roles in regulating eco-hydrologic process, which is significant for large-scale habitat promotion and vegetation restoration in many dry-land ecosystems. Such effects, however, are not yet fully studied. In this study, 12 micro-plots, each with size of 0.5 m in depth and 1 m in length, were constructed on a gentle grassy hill-slo...

The UK hosts 15-19% of global upland ombrotrophic (rain fed) peatlands that are estimated to store 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon and represent a critical upland habitat with regard to biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. Net production is dependent on an imbalance between growth of peat-forming Sphagnum mosses and microbial decomposition by microorganisms that are limited by cold, acid...

ENVISAT ASAR Data acquired over four test sites were analyzed for soil moisture mapping using various models. The polarimetric data covers dual polarized HH/VV, HH/HV and single polarized VV in swaths IS2, IS2, IS4, IS5 and IS6. SIR-C Land C-band data were also used for the verification of models. Dubois et al. empirical and linear regression equations were used for soil moisture estimation. Th...

Based on a novel bare surface soil moisture (SSM) retrieval model developed from the synergistic use of the diurnal cycles of land surface temperature (LST) and net surface shortwave radiation (NSSR) (Leng et al. 2014. “Bare Surface Soil Moisture Retrieval from the Synergistic Use of Optical and Thermal Infrared Data”. International Journal of Remote Sensing 35: 988–1003.), this paper mainly in...

T he Purdue land values survey revealed a statewide increase of 3.2% in the value of average-quality bare tillable land in the year ending in June 1992, about double the tiny increase of 1991-92. The USDA estimate for the year ending January 1 was 5%. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago survey of bankers indicated a 4% increase for the year ending March 31 in “good” farmland in the northern two...

This study analyses the expansion of urban growth and land cover changes in five Saudi Arabian cities (Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah, Al-Taif and the Eastern Area) using Landsat images for the 1985, 1990, 2000, 2007 and 2014 time periods. The classification was carried out using object-based image analysis (OBIA) to create land cover maps. The classified images were used to predict the land cover chan...