The paper seeks to highlight how the character and values of marginal landscapes can be considered examples of the “third landscape” and how they can enable the mapping of tangible and intangible change (and its relative effects) through the selection of appropriate spatial indicators. A Dynamic Spatial Decision Support System was constructed to help identify the complex values characterizing a...

Urbanization is arguably the most dramatic form of highly irreversible land transformation. While urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon, it is exceptionally dynamic in India, where unprecedented urban growth rates have occurred over the last 30 years. In this uncontrolled explosive situation city planning lacks of data and information to measure, monitor, understand urban sprawl processes. The...

Urban wetlands play a significant role in the sustainable development of the urban eco-environment. However, accelerated urbanization has caused rapid changes in urban wetland landscape patterns, which may seriously affect their functions. Based on land-use maps, TM images, and field data from the Wuhan wetlands, the spatiotemporal evolution and wetland landscape pattern were quantitatively ana...

The urban landscape is highly altered by human activities and is a mosaic of different land covers and land uses. Imbedded in this are forest patches of different origins (Zipperer et al .• 1997). How these patches influence and are influenced by the urban landscape is of ecological importance when managing the urban forest for ecosystem goods and services. To evaluate how forests respond to al...

Sustainable urban development is a new concept of fundamental environmental metropolitan management that not only creates the demand for changing the concepts of economic development, but also affects social development. The current study  provides  a conceptual model of a sustainable environment pattern In District 22 of Tehran that depends on the relationship between environment and economy, ...

Urbanization continues to accelerate and profoundly transform the surface of the earth, resulting in devastating effects on the structure and functioning of ecosystems throughout the world. In the Phoenix metropolitan region, urbanization has dramatically changed the Sonoran Desert landscape in the past several decades. To understand how urban ecosystems work and to achieve ecological sustainab...

Landscape changes associated with urbanization can lead to many serious ecological and environmental problems. Quantifying the vertical structure of the urban landscape and its change is important to understand its social and ecological impacts, but previous studies mainly focus on urban horizontal expansion and its impacts on land cover/land use change. This papers focuses on the residential l...

Urbanization has profound influences on ecological communities, but our understanding of causal mechanisms is limited by a lack of attention to its component stressors. Published research suggests that at landscape scales, habitat loss and fragmentation are the major drivers of community change, whereas at local scales, human activity and vegetation management are the primary stressors. Little ...