Forests in Washington State generate substantial economic revenue from commercial timber harvesting on private lands. To investigate the rates, causes, and spatial and temporal patterns of forest harvest on private tracts throughout the Cascade Mountains, we relied on a new generation of annual land-use/land-cover (LULC) products created from the application of the Continuous Change Detection a...

Hydrological status and water table fluctuations are directly related to land use and/or land cover (LULC) changes in each area. In this research, the impact of LULC changes on groundwater quantity and quality of Khan-Mirza Plain, in the northern Karun watersheds, was investigated. For this purpose, Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellite images and ETM and OLI sensors were employed to prepare the L...

[1] In recent decades, the RockyMountainWest has been one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. Headwater streams in mountain environments may be particularly susceptible to nitrogen enrichment from residential and resort development. We utilized stream water chemistry from six synoptic sampling campaigns combined with land use/land cover (LULC) and terrain analysis in geostatist...

Developing a complex region detection algorithm that is aware of its contextual relations with several classes necessitates statistical frameworks that can encode contextual relations rather than simple rule-based applications or heuristics. In this study, we present a conditional random field (CRF) model that is generated over the results of a robust local discriminative classifier in order to...

The accuracy of the Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) data derived from remote sensing images is critical for many applications. Classification error is caused by the interaction of numerous factors, including landscape characteristics, sensor resolution, spectral overlap, preprocessing algorithms, and classification procedures. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impacts of landscape characte...

The complexity of land use and land cover change (LULC) models is often attributed to spatial heterogeneity of the phenomena they try to emulate. The associated outcome uncertainty stems from a combination of model unknowns. Contrarily to the widely shared consensus on the importance of evaluating outcome uncertainty, little attention has been given to the role a well-structured spatially-expli...

Forested catchments are generally assumed to provide higher quality water. However, this hypothesis must be validated in various contexts as interactions between multiple land use and land cover (LULC) types, ecological variables and water quality variables render this relationship highly complex. This paper applies a straightforward multivariate approach on a typical large monitoring dataset o...