Florida Panhandle region has been experiencing rapid land transformation in the recent decades. To quantify land use and land-cover (LULC) changes and other landscape changes in this area, three counties including Franklin, Liberty and Gulf were taken as a case study and an unsupervised classification approach implemented to Landsat TM images acquired from 1985 to 2005 provided a time-series of...

Woodlands and savannahs provide essential ecosystem functions and services to communities. On the African continent, they are widely utilized and converted to subsistence and intensive agriculture or urbanized. This study investigates changes in land cover over four administrative regions of North Eastern Namibia within the Kalahari woodland savannah biome, covering a total of 107,994 km2. Land...

Woodlands and savannahs provide essential ecosystem functions and services to communities. On the African continent, they are widely utilized and converted to subsistence and intensive agriculture or urbanized. This study investigates changes in land cover over four administrative regions of North Eastern Namibia within the Kalahari woodland savannah biome, covering a total of 107,994 km2. Land...

Detecting land use or land cover changes is a challenging problem in analyzing images. Change-detection plays a fundamental role in most of land use or cover monitoring systems using remote-sensing techniques. The reliability of individual automatic change-detection algorithms is currently below operating requirements when considering the intrinsic uncertainty of a change-detection algorithm an...

Land use for animal production influences the earth system in a variety of ways, including local-scale modification to biodiversity, soils, and nutrient cycling; regional changes in albedo and hydrology; and global-scale changes in greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations. Pasture is furthermore the single most extensive form of land cover, currently comprising about 22-26% of the earth's ice-...

It is currently possible to measure landscape change over large areas and determine trends in environmental condition using advanced space-based technologies accompanied by geospatial analyses of the remotely sensed data. There are numerous earth-observing satellite platforms for mapping and monitoring land cover and land-cover change; however, the traditional workhorses have been the Landsat M...

Global urban expansion has created incentives to convert green spaces to urban/built-up area. Therefore, understanding the distribution and dynamics of the land-cover changes in cities is essential for better understanding of the cities’ fundamental characteristics and processes, and of the impact of changing land-cover on potential carbon storage. We present a grid square approach using multi-...

In this study we apply a spatial conditional logit model to determine factors influencing land cover change in three contiguous counties in West Georgia between 1992 and 2001 using point (pixel) based observations of land characteristics. We found that accessibility to population and population growth affect not only development of rural lands and transition between agricultural and forestry us...

Previous research has shown that fires burn certain land cover types disproportionally to their abundance. We used quantile regression to study land cover proneness to fire as a function of fire size, under the hypothesis that they are inversely related, for all land cover types. Using five years of fire perimeters, we estimated conditional quantile functions for lower (avoidance) and upper (pr...

Land cover change may be overestimated due to positional error in multi-temporal images. To assess the potential magnitude of this bias, we introduced random positional error to identical classiŽ ed images and then subtracted them. False land cover change ranged from less than 5% for a 5-class AVHRR classiŽ cation, to more than 33% for a 20-class Landsat TM classiŽ cation. The potential for fal...