This study illustrates how remotely-sensed data and GIS can be utilized to allow planners to evaluate the relationship between land use, environmental protection policies, and resource availability. The case study examines St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana which has experienced tremendous population growth and land use change in the past two decades. To date, work has been completed on developing...

This paper illustrates the use of GIS techniques and satellite data in order to analyze impact land change on local urban microclimate. Specifically, a case study is presented that concerns city Vienna. Thereby, satellite-based images were used classify Vienna into four zones toward computation surface temperatures two reference years. The classified maps then statistically projected future, re...

Increasing rates of water extraction and regulation of hydrologic processes, coupled with destruction of natural vegetation, pollution and climate change, are jeopardizing the future persistence of wetlands and the ecological and socio-economic functions they support. Globally, it is estimated that 50% of wetlands have been lost since the 1900’s, with agricultural changes being the main cause. ...

A distributed hydrologic modeling and GIS approach is applied for the assessment of land use impact in the Steinsel sub-basin, Alzette, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. The assessment focuses on the runoff contributions from different land use classes and the potential impact of land use changes on runoff generation. The results show that the direct runoff from urban areas is dominant for a flood eve...

the complexity of urban systems in our recent world, make it difficult to evaluation and explanation of their changes with traditional and customarily methods. in the past, remote sensing has shown an ability to detect and describe urban growth patterns at different spatial scales. with new remote sensing devices (e.g. ikonos), with innovative image processing techniques and with further develo...

One of the major threats facing protected areas (PAs) is land-use change and habitat loss. We assessed the impact of land-use change on PAs. The majority of parks have been effective at protecting the ecosystems within their borders, even in areas with significant land-use pressures. More in particular, the capacity of PAs to slow down habitat degradation and to favour habitat restoration is cl...

Numerous climate change effects on biodiversity have been anticipated and documented, including extinctions, range shifts, phenological shifts, and breakdown of interactions in ecological communities, yet the relative balance of different climate drivers and their relationships to other agents of global change (for example, land use and land-use change) remains relatively poorly understood. Thi...