This paper summarises the general pattern of urban land-cover change in the Northeastern Illinois between 1972 and 1997 using Landsat acquired remotely sensed images. The region, centred by the city of Chicago, experienced dramatic land cover change in the past decades. Accompanying the redistribution of population and decentralisation of metropolitan functions are the tremendous growth and dev...

This paper analyzes characteristics, major driving forces and alternative management measures of land-use change in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, China. The study used remote sensing (RS) maps and socio-economic data. Based on RS-derived maps, two change matrices were constructed for detecting land-use change between 1987 and 1994, and between 1994 and 2000 through pixel-to-pixel comparisons. The ...

Soil loss is not limited to change from forest or woodland to other land uses/covers. It may occur when there is agricultural land-use/cover modification or conversion. Soil loss may influence loss of carbon from the soil, hence implication on greenhouse gas emission. Changing land use could be considered actually or potentially successful in adapting to climate change, or may be considered mal...

Executive Summary Increasing global demand for food and the need to address climate change risk make it ever more urgent to both protect ecosystems and use land more productively and efficiently. Brazil is a key player in this context and has made significant gains in recent decades. Between 1970 and 2006, its average national cattle farm productivity doubled and its average national crop farm ...

Using econometric models to estimate land-use change has a long tradition in literature. Recent contributions show the importance of including spatial information and of using a multinomial framework to take into account the inter-dependencies between the land-use classes. Few studies, however, agree on the relevant determinants of land-use change and there are no contributions so far comparing...

Impacts of land cover changes on watershed hydrology have been a long-term academic concern with acute dispute. But little attention has been paid to such effects on mesoscale river basins, where the society has a closer link to river hydrology. The present study focuses on a mesoscale river basin, the Suomo Basin that is located on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Land covers in the bas...

MODIS enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and land surface temperature (LST) are key indicators for monitoring vegetation cover changes in broad ecosystems. However, there has been little evaluation of these indices for detecting changes in a range of land covers in tropical regions. In this study, we investigated the characteristics and seasonal responses of LST and EVI for four different land cov...

This study intends to identify both general trends and subtle patterns of urban land changes of the past three decades in metropolitan Kansas City area. Landsat images were used to generate time series of land cover data from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. Based on remotely sensed land cover data, landscape metrics were calculated. Both the remotely sensed data and landscape metrics were u...

Shenzhen is a city that is highly representative of China’s rapid urbanization process. As the city rapidly expands, there are enormous challenges to the sustainable use of land resources. This paper introduces the evolution of urban land expansion and the sustainable land use policy of the Shenzhen Government since 2005. The policy covers the reduction in rural-to-urban land conversion, the de...

for an optimum use of natural resources in the sustainable development trend, there is a need to identify ecological resources in the shortest period of time and minimum possible cost. in this article, we aimed management ecosystem by assessment of plant covers changes at taleghan township in a twenty year period. percentage of landscape and number of patch were among the metrics that were calc...