Forest disturbances such as harvesting, wildfire and insect infestation are critical ecosystem processes affecting the carbon cycle. Because carbon dynamics are related to time since disturbance, forest stand age that can be used as a surrogate for major clear-cut/fire disturbance information has recently been recognized as an important input to forest carbon cyclemodels for improving predictio...

The Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) is currently in the process of mapping woody change across the State of Queensland for the era 1999 to 2001. SLATS covers such a large area that Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery was chosen as the most effective data for this purpose. Since 1995 the woody change in Queensland has been mapped every two years. The 1999 to 2001 change era is the f...

[1] Land surface temperature (LST) is involved in many land surface processes such as evapotranspiration, net radiation, or air temperature modeling. In this paper we present an improved methodology to retrieve LST from Landsat 4 TM, Landsat 5 TM, and Landsat 7 ETM+ using four atmospheric databases covering different water vapor ranges (from 0 to 8 g cm ) to build the LST retrieval models and u...

Knowledge of the spatial distribution of biofuel crops is an important criterion to determine the sustainability of biofuel energy production. Remotely sensed image analysis is a proven and effective tool for describing the spatial distribution of crops using vegetation characteristics. Increases in the number of options and availability of satellite sensors have expanded the horizon of choices...

The water deficit index (WDI) derived from Landsat imagery was used to detect temporal and spatial changes in grassland transpiration. The WDI, which estimates relative evapotranspiration rates based on meteorological data and the relation between surface reflectance and temperature, has been successfully applied over heterogeneous terrain with little a priori information. In this study, WDI wa...

In the Italian Alps, the majority of glaciers are small (less than 1 km), but cover a significant glaciated surface area, despite the fact that ground surveys have only dealt with the major glaciers. Analysis of some Landsat TM images taken at the end of the ablation season highlighted retreat modes in the 1980s on all glaciers in the Breonie, Aurine and Pusteresi groups (eastern Alps)—an area ...

The requirements for planimetric accuracy of satellite image correction are discussed in the context of base mapping accuracy standards. Measurements are presented for SPOT and the Landsat Thematic Mapper. Two-dimensional accuracies as low as 7.2 m (TM) and 6.4 m (SPOT) were measured, these being close to the level of noise in the measurement techniques. NATO class A 1:50000 scale standards wer...

Synoptic monitoring of estuaries, some of the most bio-diverse and productive environments on Earth, is essential to study small-scale water dynamics and its role on spatiotemporal variation in water quality important to indigenous marine species and surrounding human settlements. We present a detailed study of turbidity, an optical index of water quality, in Apalachicola Bay, Florida (USA) usi...

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