Rapidly growing urban areas tend to reveal distinctive spatial and temporal variations of land use/land cover in a locally urbanized environment. In this article, the author analyzes urban growth phenomena at a local scale by employing Geographic Information Systems, remotely sensed image data from 1984, 1994, and 2004, and landscape shape index. Since spatial patterns of land use/land cover ch...

The orbital analysis of artificial Earth satellites have revealed the existence of a strong third harmonic in the gravitational potential of the Earth which gives its ‘pear-shape’ in the averaged meridional section. Various attempts to explain this pear-shape based on physical principles have proved to be inconclusive. In this study, a new approach based upon statistical correlation between var...

Human land cover can degrade estuaries directly through habitat loss and fragmentation or indirectly through nutrient inputs that reduce water quality. Strong precipitation events are occurring more frequently, causing greater hydrological connectivity between watersheds and estuaries. Nutrient enrichment and dissolved oxygen depletion that occur following these events are known to limit popula...

A long-standing question in biology is how a group of primordial cells can give rise to complex organs. A new study finds that, in an ancient land plant, growth rate variation patterned by meristematic cells primarily determines shape.

In this paper, a land utilization efficiency evaluation model, which takes environmental loss into consideration, has been structured via taking advantage of the slack-based measure (SBM) model. Meanwhile, based on the panel data from 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2013, the paper thoroughly probed into, and discussed, the effect imposed by industry clustering and specializat...

Climate, topography, vegetation and land use interact to influence fire regimes. Variable fire regimes may promote landscape heterogeneity, diversification in vegetation pattern and biotic diversity. The objective was to compare effects of alternative land use practices on landscape heterogeneity. Patch characteristics of fire scars were measured from 21 annual burn maps produced from 1972 to 2...

  Application of gepraphic information system and image processing in evaluation of surface runoff of a watershed in recent years has increased greatly. In the study , the runoff curve number map was prepared using geographic information system (GIS)and Landsat Sattelite Images (ETM+)for two watersheds of Mansourabad in southern Khorasan province and Navroud in Gilan province based on the facto...