Land use is rapidly expanding in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, primarily from growth in the number of rural homes. There is a need to project possible future land use and assess impacts on nature reserves as a guide to future management. We assessed the potential biodiversity impacts of alternative future land use scenarios in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. An existing regression-based...

Conversion of rural lands to urban and other built-up uses affects the mix of commodities and services produced from the global land base. In the United States, there was a 34% increase in the amount of land devoted to urban and built-up uses between 1982 and 1997. This increase came predominantly from the conversion of croplands and forestland, with the largest increases in developed area happ...

Land use changes such as deforestation and agricultural expansion strongly affect stream biodiversity, with several studies demonstrating negative impacts on stream alpha diversity. Effects of forest conversion on stream beta diversity are much harder to predict, both because empirical studies are few and because competing theories suggest opposite responses. Moreover, almost no data exist for ...

Weakening of Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) is traditionally linked with large-scale perturbations and circulations. However, the impacts of local changes in land use and land cover (LULC) on ISMR have yet to be explored. Here, we analyzed this topic using the regional Weather Research and Forecasting model with European Center for Medium range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) reanalysis data fo...

Land use and land cover (LULC) patterns play an important role in the establishment and spread of invasive plants. Understanding LULC changes is useful for early detection and management of land-use change to reduce the spread of invasive species. The primary objective of this study is to analyze and predict LULC changes in Connecticut. LULC maps for 1996, 2001 and 2006 were selected to analyze...

It has long been recognized that major drivers of biodiversity loss include both the harvest of wild species and the conversion of habitat for productive purposes. Land that is converted may or may not be lost as habitat for many species. In some cases, monoculture production for example, land conversion reduces the number niches and hence the level of biodiversity. In other cases, it has the o...

We show the effects of uncertainty, ecological and economic irreversibility, and endogenous learning on land preservation decisions for species conservation. We compare the optimal decisions of three types of decision makers: an experimenting decision maker who recognizes the endogeneity of information, a real options decision maker who ignores the endogeneity but recognizes the future availabi...

introduction: p in soils exists in many complex chemical forms, which differ markedly in their behavior, mobility and resistance to bioavailability in the soils. the total p content of a soil provides little information regarding the behavior of p in the environment. the various forms of p present to a large degree, determine the fate and transport of p in soils. fractionation schemes using dif...

Problem statement: It is an important task to detect land cover changes from remotely sensed data for environmental monitoring. Although there are some applications of visual textures to the land use, they are limited to a few land cover categories with the application of one texture measure. Since land cover types are complex and often the integration of various objects, applying one texture m...