Remote sensing techniques are now commonly applied to map and monitor urban land uses to measure growth and to assist with development and planning. Recent work in this area has highlighted the use of textures and other spatial features that can be measured in very high spatial resolution imagery. Far less attention has been given to using geospatial vector data (i.e. points, lines, polygons) t...

The initial settlement of Iceland in the 9th and 10th centuries AD was based on animal husbandry, with an emphasis on dairy cattle and sheep. For this activity, land resources that offered a range of grazing and fodder production opportunities were required to sustain farmsteads. In this paper, the nature of land within the boundaries of settlements in an area of Western Iceland centered on Rey...

The significant objective of this paper is to describe how Cellular Automata (CA) can be used to predict land use land change in the settlement growth and show the advantage of integrating the Neural Network with CA. Cellular automata have been utilized as a prediction technique in the study of an impressively wide range of dynamic phenomena. A spatial simulation model comprises an assortment o...

The international initiatives by various agencies (such as World bank, FAO, UN, FIG, etc.) suggest that cadastre and land registration systems are currently undergoing major changes worldwide. On such changes, the emerging trends focus on easy access to land, security of land tenure, establishment and operation of efficient land markets, formalization of property rights, incorporating customary...

Understanding the spatial point pattern of human settlements and their geographical associations are important for understanding the drivers of land use and land cover change and the relationship between environmental and ecological processes on one hand and cultures and lifestyles on the other. In this study, a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach, Ripley's K function and Monte Carlo s...

Biosphere Reserves attempt to align existing biodiversity conservation with sustainable resource use, specifically for improving socio-economic circumstances of resident communities. Typically, the Biosphere Reserve model is applied to an established landscape mosaic of existing land uses; these are often socio-ecological systems where strict environmental protection and community livelihoods a...

Spatially extensive analysis of satellite, climate, and census data reveals humanenvironment interactions of regional or continental concern i n the United States. A grid-based principal components analysis of Bureau of Census variables revealed two independent demographic phenomena, a-settlement reflecting traditional human settlement patterns and p-settlement describing relative population gr...

BACKGROUND EuroAmerican land-use and its legacies have transformed forest structure and composition across the United States (US). More accurate reconstructions of historical states are critical to understanding the processes governing past, current, and future forest dynamics. Here we present new gridded (8x8km) reconstructions of pre-settlement (1800s) forest composition and structure from th...

Annual land-use decisions of settlement farmers, estimated to approach half a million in the Amazon, can have significant impacts on forest conversion of the largest tropical moist forests. Given the biodiversity and climate change consequences of the disappearance of this forest, it is pivotal to understand these farmers’ reactions to combinations of technologies, policies, and institutional a...