The Taita Hills, located in south-eastern Kenya, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Despite the recognized ecological importance of this region, the landscape has been heavily fragmented due to hundreds of years of human activity. Most of the natural vegetation has been converted for agroforestry, croplands and exotic forest plantations, resulting in a very heterogeneous landscape. Gi...

Remote sensing can be used to rapidly generate land use maps for assisting emergency response personnel with resource deployment decisions and impact assessments. In this study we focus on constructing accurate land cover maps to map the impacted area in the case of a nuclear material release. The proposed methodology involves integration of results from two different approaches to increase cla...

There are growing demands for detailed and accurate land cover maps in land system research and planning. Macro-scale land cover maps normally cannot satisfy the studies that require detailed land cover maps at micro scales. In the meantime, applying conventional pixel-based classification methods in classifying high-resolution aerial imagery is ineffective to develop high accuracy land-cover m...

The LACO-Wiki tool represents an open access, online portal that offers standardized land cover validation at local to global scales. LACO-Wiki integrates the LACOVAL prototype for land cover validation and the Geo-Wiki system for visualization, validation and crowdsourcing of land cover. This paper presents a conceptual overview of the LACO-Wiki system and describes the main validation workflo...

Along with the creation of new maps, current efforts for improving global land cover (GLC) maps focus on integrating maps by accounting for their relative merits, e.g., agreement amongst maps or map accuracy. Such integration efforts may benefit from the use of multiple GLC reference datasets. Using available reference datasets, this study assesses spatial accuracy of recent GLC maps and compar...

The Globcover initiative comprises the development and demonstration of a service that in first instance produces a Global land cover map for year 2005/2006. Globcover uses MERIS fine resolution (300m) mode data acquired between mid 2005 and mid 2006 and, for maximum user benefit, the thematic legend is compatible with the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). This new product updates and...

Socioeconomic, political, and policy decisions by the government may influence socioecological changes of land use cover pattern for rangeland people over time. This paper examines historical policy, socioeconomic that influenced in former pastoral community Sanga-Lake Mburo Rangeland Ecosystem South Western Uganda. Data on events were documented from literature supplemented an opportunistic di...