Despite the importance of organic soils, including peatlands, in the global carbon cycle, detailed information on regional and global emissions is scarce. This is due to the difficulty to map, measure, and assess the complex dynamics of land, soil, and water interactions needed to assess the human-driven degradation of organic soils. We produced a new methodology for the comprehensive assessmen...

Recently, land use and cover change is recognized as a one of major drivers of global change. Consequently, an updated and accurate database concerning their distribution is essential for global change research. This study investigated a land use change based on change of temporal pattern which applied to the wavelet-filtered MODIS EVI from 2000 to 2009. The temporal pattern analysis was able t...

land-use planning is a science that determines the type optimum of land-use through studying the ecological characteristics of the land as well as its socio-economic structure. the primary objective of this study is to evaluate the land-use and natural resources for future sustainable land planning using gis. in this study, the makhdoom’s systematic method was used to analyze the ecological and...

Using a recent Leaf Area Index (LAI) dataset and the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4), we investigated percent changes and controlling factors of global vegetation growth for the period 1982 to 2009. Over that 28-year period, both the remote-sensing estimate and model simulation show a significant increasing trend in annual vegetation growth. Latitudinal asymmetry appeared in both products...

Arid environment is a dry landscape or region that received an extremely low amount of precipitation. Arid areas are located where vegetation cover is sparse to almost nonexistent. Almost one third of earth land surface is arid or desert. Over desert areas, a number of land cover patterns can be observed. One example is given here for the Arabian Peninsula. The located area can be found in Fig....

I declare that this research report is my own unaided work. It is being submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Science at the University of the Witwatersrand. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination at any other university. Figure 1 Map showing the location of the study area. White areas represent privately owned land used for Figure 3: Long-term (198...