Meta-analyses reveal that nutrient yields tend to be higher for watersheds dominated by anthropogenic uses (e.g., urban, agriculture) and lower for watersheds dominated by natural vegetation. One implication of this pattern is that loss of natural vegetation will produce increases in watershed nutrient yields. Yet, the same meta-analyses also reveal that, absent land-cover change, watershed nut...

Climate and land cover change are driving a major reorganization of terrestrial biotic communities in tropical ecosystems. In an effort to understand how biodiversity patterns in the tropics will respond to individual and combined effects of these two drivers of environmental change, we use species distribution models (SDMs) calibrated for recent climate and land cover variables and projected t...

Rainfall patterns and land cover are two important factors that affect the runoff generation process. To determine the surface and subsurface flows associated with different rainfall patterns on sloping Ferralsols under different land cover types, observational data related to surface and subsurface flows from 5 m × 15 m plots were collected from 2010 to 2012. The experiment was conducted to as...

Due to increased availability and affordable cost of TM7 data, one envisages its widespread use for land cover mapping in many developing countries. There is need to establish not only the potential but also the limitations of TM data for land cover mapping in some natural ecosystems of the tropics. Uganda is a tropical country with well-distributed rainfall and its landscapes are characterised...

Global land cover mapping with high accuracy is essential to downstream researches. Five global land cover data sets derived from moderate-resolution satellites, i.e., Global Land Cover Characterization (GLCC), University of Maryland land cover product (UMd), Global Land Cover 2000 project data (GLC2000), MODIS Land Cover product (MODIS LC), and GLOBCOVER land cover product (GlobCover), have be...

Land cover changes significantly influence vegetation greenness in different regions. Dense Landsat time series stacks provide unique opportunity to analyze land cover change and vegetation greenness trends at finer spatial scale. In the past three decades, large reclamation activities have greatly changed land cover and vegetation growth of coastal areas. However, rarely has research investiga...

The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called 'landscape mosaic' as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km2 study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible lands...

The rapid development and increasing availability of high-resolution satellite (HRS) images provides increased opportunities to monitor large scale land cover. However, inefficiency and excessive independence on expert knowledge limits the usage of HRS images on a large scale. As a knowledge organization and representation method, ontology can assist in improving the efficiency of automatic or ...