BACKGROUND This study investigated the microclimatic behavior of different land cover types in urban parks and, the correlation between air temperature and land cover composition to understand how land cover affects outdoor thermal environment during hot summer. METHODS To address this issue, air temperatures were measured on four different land cover types at four observation sites inside an...

large scale land use/cover changes and habitat fragmentation is a major factor in the distribution and functioning of ecosystems. for analysis the relationship between land use changes and their impacts on biodiversity, land cover and land use information is needed at different scales. the main goal of this study was to quantify the land use/ cover changes in arasbaran biosphere reserve, northw...

In recent years, large scale land cover maps constructed from remotely sensed data have become important information sources for resource management. For many applications, poor map accuracy limits their usability. This article investigates methods of combining classification rules for improving accuracy in general, and for exploiting spatial information in particular. We examine the performanc...

Earth’s land cover has been extensively transformed over time due to both human activities and natural causes. Previous global studies have focused on developing spatial and temporal patterns of dominant human land-use activities (e.g., cropland, pastureland, urban land, wood harvest). Process-based modeling studies adopt different strategies to estimate the changes in land cover by using these...

We use a linear unmixing approach to test how land use and forestry maps, in combination with the MODIS BRDF/albedo product, can be used to estimate land cover type albedos in boreal regions. Operational land use maps from three test areas in Finland and Canada were used to test the method. The resulting endmember albedo estimates had low standard errors of the mean and were realistic for the m...

The relationship between topography, land use, and topsoil moisture storage is investigated for a small catchment with undulating deep loess hilslopes in the south of the Netherlands. For a period of 10 months, soil moisture profiles have been measured weekly at 15 locations throughout the catchment. A Generalized Additive Model was employed to find relationships between the various factors inf...

We compared the effectiveness of environmental variables, and in particular of land-use indicators, to explain species richness patterns across taxonomic groups and biogeographical scales (i.e. overall pan-Europe and ecoregions within pan-Europe). Using boosted regression trees that handle non-linear relationships, we compared the relative influence (as a measure of effectiveness) of environmen...