Present-day land surface schemes used in weather prediction and climate models include parameterizations of physical processes whose complex nonlinear interactions can lead to models of unknown spatial and temporal characteristics. This paper describes the timescales of the evapotranspiration response of 16 land surface schemes which participated in the Project for Intercomparison of Land-surfa...

A framework for the identification and monitoring of forest clearcuts and their regeneration is presented. LANDSAT digital data are classified to detect clearcuts and their major regeneration components, including brush, grass, bare soil, and conifer. Historical LANDSAT digital data are used to provide a changedetection analysis of forest conditions. Area summaries of land cover are obtained fo...

Urban development has enlarged the modification of natural resources and has changed land use and land cover patterns. Urbanization is a process of increase of modernization system which modifies the socioeconomic activities and revolutionizes the land use practice according to time frame. Due to the proximate and underlying causes, land use and land cover change has become the main challenge o...

Due to inappropriate planning and management, accelerated urban growth and tremendous loss in land, especially cropland, have become a great challenge for sustainable urban development [1]. Detection of such changes may help decision makers and planners to understand the factors in land use and land cover changes in order to take effective and useful measures. Remote sensing and GIS techniques ...

Inappropriate land use has caused a series of environmental disasters such as floods and sand storms, and some of them involved unused land changes with highly localized distributions in arid and semi-arid regions with fragile ecosystems. As the third-rank category of first-level land use/cover in China, unused land (UL) is now playing an increasingly important role in protection of the natural...

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...

the rehabilitation of sandy desertified land in various dryland ecosystems by different management practices has a great potential to increase aggregate stability and improve soil quality. however, plants in general may have a different ability to sustain soil. the objective was to determine the effects of reclamation practices including haloxylon ammodendron and atriplex canescens plantation o...

Previous field research on the Horqin Sandy Land (China), which has suffered from severe desertification during recent decades, revealed how land use on a sand-dune topography affects both land degradation and restoration. This study aimed to depict the spatial distribution of local land use in order to shed more light on previous field findings regarding policies on a broader scale. We perform...