To support conservation planning, we ask whether a park’s impact on deforestation rates varies with observable land characteristics that planners could use to prioritize sites. Using matching methods to address bias from non-random location, we find deforestation impacts vary greatly due to park lands’ characteristics. Avoided deforestation is greater if parks are closer to the capital city, in...

Geographic information science increasingly meets cognitive science, as comprehending (i.e. perceiving and conceptualising) spatial characteristics induces spatial cognition and behaviour. However, the widely deployed models of space fail in accounting for those conceptualisation mechanisms. In this context, the present work aims at relating human spatial perception of land use to the landscape...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is a growing area of research. This Special Issue aims to capture the main trends in VGI research based on 16 original papers, and distinguishes between two main areas, i.e., those that deal with the characteristics of VGI and those focused on applications of VGI. The topic of quality assessment and assurance dominates the papers on VGI characteristics, ...

This paper presents one of the interferometric related applications that has recently attracted more interest from the scientific community. The objective is to exploit the coherence information derivable from a couple of ERS SAR images to evaluate land surface characteristics and its changes. An area located in Patagony has been selected for this work. Results should provide information about ...

China has a unique land use system in which there are two types of land ownership, namely, state-owned urban land and farmer collective-owned rural land. Despite strict restrictions on the use rights of farmer collective-owned land, rural land is, in fact, developed along two pathways: it is formally acquired by the state and transferred into state ownership, or it is informally developed while...

This paper describes the structure of the LAND USE SCANNER model, a GIS based model developed to generate spatial forecasts for various types of land use for a large number of grids. The model basically allocates land according to bid prices for various types of land use. The possibility of government intervention in land use is taken into account among others by adding aggregate constraints. T...

We studied the land-cover data used by the regional climate model REMO and the land surface model JSBACH, for Finland and surrounding areas. To date, the land-cover data determining REMO’s surface parameterisations have originated from the Global Ecosystem classification of the Global Land Cover Characteristics (GLCC-GEC) database. The same database has also been used as basis for prescribed pl...