Multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) has been widely applied for estimating fractional land covers from remote sensing imagery. MESMA has proven effective in addressing inter-class and intra-class endmember variability by allowing pixel-specific endmember combinations. This method, however, assumes that each land cover type has an equal probability of being included in the model...

Florida Panhandle region has been experiencing rapid land transformation in the recent decades. To quantify land use and land-cover (LULC) changes and other landscape changes in this area, three counties including Franklin, Liberty and Gulf were taken as a case study and an unsupervised classification approach implemented to Landsat TM images acquired from 1985 to 2005 provided a time-series of...

We introduce the land-cover cascade (LCC) as a conceptual framework to quantify the transfer of land-cover-disturbance effects to stream biota. We hypothesize that disturbance is propagated through multivariate systems through key variables that transform a disturbance and pass a reorganized disturbance effect to the next hierarchical level where the process repeats until ultimately affecting b...

The importance of the surrounding landscape to aquatic ecosystems has been well established. Most research linking aquatic ecosystems to landscapes has focused on the one-way effect of land on water. However, to understand fully the complex interactions between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, aquatic ecosystems must be seen not only as receptors of human modification of the landscape, but a...

In land use planning, mapping the present land use / land cover situation is a necessary tool for determining the current condition and for identifying land use trends. In this study, in order to provide a land use/ land cover map for Ilam watershed, the IRS-1C image data from 25th April 2006 were used. Initial qualitative evaluation on data showed no significant radiometric error. Ortho-rectif...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of land-cover change in western Honduras. Ground-truthed satellite image analysis indicates that between 1987 and 1996, net reforestation occurred in the 1,015.12 km study region. While some reforestation can be attributed to a 1987 ban on logging, the area of reforestation greatly exceeds that of previously clear-cut areas. Further, new area was also...

The remote sensing technology can extract change information of land cover quickly, and is widely used in real-time monitoring land use changing and urban expansion. According to the characteristics of land cover information identification present in high resolution remote sensing images, a new identification algorithm of land cover change information based on independent component analysis (IC...

Quantifying the amount of forest and change in the amount of forest are key to ensure that appropriate management practices and policies are in place to maintain the array of ecosystem services provided by forests. There are a range of analytical techniques and data available to estimate these forest parameters, however, not all ‘forest’ is the same and various components of change have been pr...

Great changes in land use/land cover from rapid urbanization have occurred in the PearlRiver Delta, China. As the primary cause of land development in the urbanization process,urban expansion has mostly occurred on land with higher NPP, significantly impacting theregional ecosystems. The primary purpose of this study was to reveal the impacts of urbanexpansion on the regional NPP. The land cove...

in the recent years, human activities have led to changes in land use and land cover, consequently, these changes lead to the structure and function of ecosystems. spatial-temporal change detection of land use is important to understand the relationships and interactions between human and natural resources and to make appropriate decisions due to changes in land use and land cover occurs in bro...