The Taita Hills, located in south-eastern Kenya, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Despite the recognized ecological importance of this region, the landscape has been heavily fragmented due to hundreds of years of human activity. Most of the natural vegetation has been converted for agroforestry, croplands and exotic forest plantations, resulting in a very heterogeneous landscape. Gi...

This study promotes the use of a multiclassifier system (MCS) fed with high-resolution remote sensing data coupled with contextual and textural data in the domain of land cover and land use classification. The gain of this approach is shown by a favorable comparison of our BAGFS classifier (a mixture of bagging and feature subset classifier) over two single classifier techniques (5-NN and C4.5 ...

Land cover change has been one of the major drivers of change leading to an alteration of critical habitats for many of the threatened species worldwide. Species with a narrow range and specialized habitats such as wetland ecosystems are at higher risk. The present paper describes spatial and temporal land use and cover change over the period of last 34 years (1976–2010) in the Koshi Tappu Wild...

The study aimed to determine the impact of sound land use management to the runoff in Kabuntalan, Maguindanao in Tamontaka river basin. This was done through simulation and the comparison of the three land cover scenarios such as 2015 land cover, 2025 projected land cover and desired land use to determine its difference in terms of runoff. Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling Syste...

Assessment and monitoring of rice agriculture over large areas has been limited by cloud cover, optical sensor spatial and temporal resolutions, and lack of systematic or open access radar. Dense time series of open access Sentinel-1 C-band data at moderate spatial resolution offers new opportunities for monitoring agriculture. This is especially pertinent in South and Southeast Asia where rice...

Accuracy assessment, also referred to as validation, is a key process in the workflow of developing a land cover map. To make this process open and transparent, we have developed a new online tool called LACO-Wiki, which encapsulates this process into a set of four simple steps including uploading a land cover map, creating a sample from the map, interpreting the sample with very high resolutio...

Various classification methods have been applied for low resolution of the entire Earth's surface from recorded satellite images, but insufficient study has determined which method, for which satellite data, is economically viable for tropical forest land use mapping. This study employed Iterative Self Organizing Data Analysis Techniques (ISODATA) and K-Means classification techniques to classi...

Urban land use classification from remotely sensed images has drawn great attention in the past decades. Most researchers derive land use data from remotely sensed images alone, but the results are not quite satisfying for detecting detailed land use classes in urban areas. Fuzzy urban land use classes proposed here consist of a number of fuzzy memberships that offer direct links to findings fr...

Landsat MSS and ETM+ images were analyzed to detect 25-year land-cover change (1976–2001) in the critical Taguibo Watershed in Mindanao Island, Southern Philippines. This watershed has experienced historical modifications of its land-cover due to the presence of logging industries in the 1950s, and continuous deforestation due to illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture in the present tim...

Decadal to centennial land use and land cover change has been consistently singled out as a key element and an important driver of global environmental change, playing an essential role in balancing energy use. Understanding long-term human-environment interactions requires historical reconstruction of past land use and land cover changes. Most of the existing historical reconstructions have in...