We edited, redrew, and evaluated four unpublished historical vegetation maps of the Western Pamirs (Tajikistan) by the Soviet geobotanist Okmir E. Agakhanjanz. These maps cover an area of 5,188 km2 and date from 1958 to 1960. The purpose of this article is to make the historic vegetation data available to the scientific community and thus preserve a hitherto non available and up to now neglecte...

Classifying land cover is perhaps the most common application of remote sensing, yet classification at frequent temporal intervals remains a challenging task due to radiometric differences among scenes, time and budget constraints, and semantic differences among class definitions from different dates. The automatic adaptive signature generalization (AASG) algorithm overcomes many of these limit...

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...

Land cover is one of basic data layers in geographic information system for physical planning and environmentalmonitoring. Digital image classification is generally performed to produce land cover maps from remote sensing data,particularly for large areas. In the present study the multispectral image from IRS LISS-III image along with ancillary datasuch as vegetation indices, principal componen...

The preparation of vegetation cover maps by used the land inventory and a traditional method has a lot of cost and time. But today, remote sensing is one of the main sources of data collection and information production for study and monitoring land resources, and was efficient tools for providing quickly and timely data and information needs for program planning in the natural resource filed. ...

Google Earth (GE) provides very high resolution (VHR) natural-colored (red-green-blue, RGB) images based on commercial spaceborne sensors over worldwide coastal areas. GE is rarely used as a direct data source to address coastal issues despite the tremendous potential of data transferability. This paper describes an inexpensive and easy-to-implement methodology to construct a GE natural-colored...

-Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer imagery provides frequent and low-cost coverage of the earth, but its coarse spatial resolution (-1.1 km by 1.1 km) does not lend itself to standard techniques of automated categorization of land cover classes because the pixels are generally mixed; that is, the extent of the pixel includes several land use/cover classes. Unmixing procedures were develo...

We present a pattern-based regionalization of the conterminous US – a partitioning of the country into a number of mutually exclusive and exhaustive regions that maximizes the intra-region stationarity of land cover patterns and inter-region disparity between those patterns. The result is a discretization of the land surface into a number of landscape pattern types (LPTs) – spatial units each c...