Conversion of rangelands into cultivated land is one of the main challenges affecting the management of rangelands in Ethiopia. In order to inform policy makers about trends in land-use conversion, this study examined the drivers, trends, and impacts of land conversions in five locations selected in the Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia. This study integrated survey interviews from agro-pa...

Conversion of native vegetation into farmed grassland in the Lake Taupo catchment commenced in the late 1950s. The lake’s iconic value is being threatened by the slow decline in lake water quality that has become apparent since the 1970s. This decline is due to increased nitrogen (N) leaching from the catchment, with 95% of the ‘manageable’ leached N estimated to be sourced from livestock farms...

During the past decades, natural hazards such as floods, landslides and forest fires have caused major loss of human lives and the destruction of economic land social infrastructure, as well as environmental damages. The Italian National Project: PROSA (PRodotti di Osservazione Satellitari per l'Allerta Meteorologica) is a pilot project funded by the Italian Space Agency, which aims at contribu...

Land cover mapping relates to identifying the types of features present on the surface of the earth. It deals with discerning the extent of land cover features namely vegetation, geologic, urban infrastructure, water, bare soil or others. Variations in land cover and associated physical characteristics do influence weather and climate of our earth and hence, it is considered an essential elemen...

Horqin Sandy Land is located in northeast China (4241’-4515’N, 11835’-12330’E). The wind-sand topography in Horqin Sandy Land can be described as two series--sand deposition and wind erosion. Wind is the natural force for the formation of wind-sandy environment, under windsandy environment, the wind erosion processes such as sand drifting, dust-storm, etc. occurred frequently because of the fre...

Fractional covers of photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic vegetation are key indicators for land degradation surveillance in the dryland of China. However, there are no available, well validated, and multispectral-based products. Aiming for this, we selected the Beijing and Tianjin Sandstorm Source Region as the study area, and utilized the linear spectral mixture model for generating the frac...

Human activities greatly affect the environment causing its degradation. Urban development and road networks construction cause main impacts on ecosystems and particularly on vegetation cover: road constructions induce complete degradation of the vegetation cover and often leaves a bare land, sometimes without even a soil cover. Reconstitution of vegetation cover is necessary to limit superfici...

We present new radar-based techniques for efficient identification of surface changes generated by lava and pyroclastic flows, and apply these to the 1996 eruption of Manam Volcano, Papua New Guinea. Polarimetric Land P-band airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, along with a C-band DEM, were acquired over the volcano on 17 November 1996 during a major eruption sequence. The Lband data a...