Quantifying the amount of forest and change in the amount of forest are key to ensure that appropriate management practices and policies are in place to maintain the array of ecosystem services provided by forests. There are a range of analytical techniques and data available to estimate these forest parameters, however, not all ‘forest’ is the same and various components of change have been pr...

Cities are experiencing rapid population growth and consequently extensive urbanization. Land-use/land-cover change is one of the important elements worldwide, which significantly affect the environment. This study aims to describe the emergence of urban heat and cool islands as a result of changes in land-use/land-cover. Land surface temperature over a 32-year period in Isfahan city, Iran was ...

Monitoring land cover changes from the 1970s in West Africa is important for assessing the dynamics between land cover types and understanding the anthropogenic impact during this period. Given the lack of historical land cover maps over such a large area, Landsat data is a reliable and consistent source of information on land cover dynamics from the 1970s. This study examines land cover change...

Scientists need a better and larger set of tools to validate land-use change models, because it is essential to know a model’s prediction accuracy. This paper describes how to use the relative operating characteristic (ROC) as a quantitative measurement to validate a land-cover change model. Typically, a crucial component of a spatially explicit simulation model of land-cover change is a map of...

Remotely sensed imagery is an attractive source of information for mapping and monitoring land cover. Fine spatial resolution imagery is typically acquired infrequently, but fine temporal resolution systems commonly provide coarse spatial resolution imagery. Sub-pixel land cover change mapping is a method that aims to use the advantages of these multiple spatial and temporal resolution sensing ...

ocal and regional land-use and land-cover change is an important ingredient in the larger problem of global environmental change. Land-use patterns, driven by a variety of social processes, result in land-cover changes that affect biodiversity, water and radiation budgets, trace-gas emissions, and other factors that, cumulatively, alter the global climate and biosphere. Most research on global ...

Land-cover change is a major component of global change (Foley et al., 2005). Many forms of land-cover change, such as deforestation and urbanization, are directly associated with land use. Other land-cover changes, such as melting of permafrost, may be indirectly associated with human activity via anthropogenically induced climate change. Further changes in land cover, such as the expansion of...

The remote sensing technology can extract change information of land cover quickly, and is widely used in real-time monitoring land use changing and urban expansion. According to the characteristics of land cover information identification present in high resolution remote sensing images, a new identification algorithm of land cover change information based on independent component analysis (IC...