Satellite based land cover classification for Africa’s semi-arid ecosystems is hampered commonly by heterogeneous landscapes with mixed vegetation and small scale land use. Higher spatial resolution remote sensing time series data can improve classification results under these difficult conditions. While most large scale land cover mapping attempts rely on moderate resolution data, PROBA-V prov...

An agent-based model, incorporating a small set of primarily agent-based variables, was designed to explain land-use decision making. Agents are land-owners, who allocate their labour and land for different uses in regular time intervals. The goal is to understand what kind of spatial patterns emerge from different agent characteristics, and decision and learning mechanisms. Landscapes produced...

Land use and land cover changes will continue to affect resilient human communities and ecosystems as a result of climate change. However, an assessment of land use and land cover changes over time in Indian Ocean Islands is less documented. The land use/cover data changes over 10 years at smaller geographical scale across Unguja Island in Zanzibar were analyzed. Downscaling of the data was obt...

Landuse and land cover change (LUCC) is regarded as a good indicator that represents the impacts of human activities on the earth’s environment. When the large collection of multi-temporal satellite images has become available, it is possible to study a long-term historical process of land cover change. The Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in southern China is a region where the rapid development...

Land cover information is necessary for a large range of environmental applications related to climate impacts and adaption, emergency response, wildlife habitat, etc. In Canada, a 2008 user survey indicated that the most practical land cover data is provided in a nationwide 30 m spatial resolution format, with an update frequency of five years. In response to this need, the Canada Centre for R...

The LACO-Wiki tool represents an open access, online portal that offers standardized land cover validation at local to global scales. LACO-Wiki integrates the LACOVAL prototype for land cover validation and the Geo-Wiki system for visualization, validation and crowdsourcing of land cover. This paper presents a conceptual overview of the LACO-Wiki system and describes the main validation workflo...

Previous studies at the county level have found an increase in forest cover, urbanization, and water structures in the Black Belt counties of Alabama and have documented the connection between such increase and socioeconomic development in the region. However, such findings have limited inferences as the studies did not address the variations in demographic, socioeconomic, and land cover attrib...

Can social inequality be seen imprinted in a forest landscape? We studied the relationship between land holding, land use, and inequality in a peasant community in the Peruvian Amazon where farmers practice swidden-fallow cultivation. Longitudinal data on land holding, land use, and land cover were gathered through field-level surveys (n = 316) and household interviews (n = 51) in 1994/1995 and...

Urbanization brings biophysical changes in the composition of the landscape. Such change has an impact on the thermal environment locally. The urban mosaic of land use and land cover is thus characteristically composed of local climate zones. The spatial variation in the land surface temperature across specific zone is studied for Bhopal city. The objective of the study was to understand how th...

Projections of land cover change generated from integrated assessment models (IAM) and other economic-based models can be applied for analyses of environmental impacts at sub-regional and landscape scales. For those IAM and economic models that project land cover change at the continental or regional scale, these projections must be downscaled and spatially distributed prior to use in climate o...