Land surface radiation and energy budgets are critical to address a variety of scientific and application issues related to climate trends, weather predictions, hydrologic and biogeophysical modeling, and the monitoring of ecosystem health and agricultural crops. This is an introductory paper to the special issue of land surface radiation and energy budgets from an international conference on t...

Nearly 8 million dry tons (7 256 000 t) of municipal sewage sludge are produced each year in the USA by the more than 15 000 publicly owned treatment plants and the tonnage is increasing. Municipalities are faced with increasing cost of incineration, decreasing land for and increasing costs of landfills, and environmental concerns over ocean dumping. Under the circumstances, the attractiveness ...

Land is becoming a scarce natural resource due to the burgeoning population growth and urbanization. Essentially, detecting changes in land surface is significant for understanding and assessing human impacts on the environment. Nowadays, land use change detection using remote sensing data provides quantitative and timely information for management and evaluation of natural resources. This stud...

This paper provides an overview of a number of different methodologies for land use analysis aimed at agricultural policy support, developed during a decade of collaborative research in Costa Rica. The methodologies are classified in five groups, (i) projective, (ii) explorative, (iii) predictive, (iv) generative and (v) prototyping. Whereas the first three involve land use analysis on (sub-)re...

Economic growth in China is accompanied by many problems, such as rapid deterioration of the environment and a sharp decline in the area of arable land. China’s current land-use planning system fails to deal with these problems, especially at the regional level. The lack of sustainable spatial allocation at regional level has become a pressing problem. This article aims to: (1) analyze the reas...

Land use change is one of the most important scientific research themes in the field of global environmental change. Due to the presence of uncertainty and randomness in the real world, it is difficult to simulate land use change exactly. To address the spatial uncertainty and temporal randomness in land use change, we propose a model for simulating land use change based on Markov chain and cel...

While Canada ranks second in the world in terms of national land area, its most productive arable land is limited in extent. These lands are also under pressure due to rapid urbanization, especially in the high growth areas of southern Ontario, the CalgaryEdmonton corridor and the lower Fraser River valley of British Columbia. Currently, a program is underway in the Earth Sciences Sector of Nat...