Undoubtedly, land degradation linked to desertification causes a decrease in qualitative and quantitative features of natural resources. This research aimed to assess land desertification by local residents and their role in controlling desertification in Isfahan province, Iran in 2016. The criteria were soil climate, vegetation, erosion, and demography. The indicators of soil texture, stone fr...

The world is witnessing a dramatic shift of settlement pattern from rural to urban population, particularly in developing countries. The rapid Addis Ababa urbanization reflects this global phenomenon and the subsequent socio-economic and environmental impacts, are causing massive public uproar and political instability. The objective of this study was to use remotely sensed Landsat data to iden...

The aim of th is research is to produce an urban land cover map ready to be used for planning and management. To extract the reliable information from the selected remote sensing (RS) data, a knowledge-based method based on a rule-based approach is constructed. The result of the knowledge-based technique is compared with the result of a standard maximum likelihood classification (MLC) method an...

In recent years, large scale land cover maps constructed from remotely sensed data have become important information sources for resource management. Classifiers are commonly used to predict land cover for unsampled map units; hence, they play a key role in map construction. Achieving adequate classifier accuracy is often problematic for highly variable and difficult-to-sample landscapes. This ...

MODIS LAI product has been increasingly important for analyzing the process and productivity of terrestrial ecosystems at global scale. This study was aimed to assess the quality of global MODIS LAI product for applications in regional and even in local scales. To examine the quality of MODIS LAI data, we produced a reference LAI map that was derived by relating the ground-measured LAI to Lands...

Land cover maps provide critical input data for global models of land use. Urgent questions exist, such as how much land is available for the expansion of agriculture to combat food insecurity, how high will be competition for land between food and bioenergy in the future as well as how much land is there available for afforestation projects? These questions can only be answered if reliable map...

Summarizing topological information from datasets and maps defined on them is a central theme in topological data analysis. Mapper, a tool for such summarization, takes as input both a possibly high dimensional dataset and a map defined on the data, and produces a summary of the data by using a cover of the codomain of the map. This cover, via a pullback operation to the domain, produces a simp...