INTRODUCTION Dynamics of most of vector-borne diseases are strongly linked to global and local environmental changes. Landscape changes are indicators of human activities or natural processes that are likely to modify the ecology of the diseases. Here, a landscape approach developed at a local scale is proposed for extracting mosquito favourable biotopes, and for testing ecological parameters w...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) represents a growing source of potentially valuable data for many applications, including land cover map validation. It is still an emerging field and many different approaches can be used to take value from VGI, but also many pros and cons are related to its use. Therefore, since it is timely to get an overview of the subject, the aim of this article is...

Global land cover is one of the essential terrestrial baseline datasets available for ecosystem modeling, however uncertainty remains an issue. Tools such as Google Earth offer enormous potential for land cover validation. With an ever increasing amount of very fine spatial resolution images (up to 50 cm × 50 cm) available on Google Earth, it is becoming possible for every Internet user (includ...

Land use may be regarded as one of the most important factors affecting theenvironment with respect to human activities. So far, destroying the rangelands andchanging them into the waste lands and poor rangelands has been proposed as the mostsignificant variations of land use done by human beings. This paper has been conducted toevaluate the variations of vegetation percentage and land uses in ...

Changes in land use and land cover can lead to irreversible changes in forests that result in overall reductions in biodiversity and loss of elements of high ecological and cultural value. Land use and cover change models can be an important resource for scientists to develop a sustainable land management program. This paper presents a method to assess the accuracy of a forestation predictive m...

The use of neural networks to classify land-cover from remote sensing imagery relies on the ability to determine a winner from the candidate land-cover types based on the imagery information available. In the case of a “winnertakes-all” scenario, this does not allow us a measure of how much the prediction of each pixel’s land-cover can be trusted. We present a three-stage method where only winn...

Accurate mapping of land cover on a regional scale is useful for climate and environmental modeling. In this study, we present a novel land cover classification product based on spectral and phenological information for the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China. The product is derived at a 500 m spatial resolution using an innovative approach employing moderate resolution imaging spe...

Many satellite images have a spatial resolution coarser than the extent of land cover patterns on the ground, leading to mixed pixels whose composite spectral response consists of responses from multiple land cover classes. Spectral unmixing procedures only determine the fractions of such classes within a coarse pixel without locating them in space. Super-resolution or sub-pixel mapping aims at...