The objective of this study is to investigate the consistency of “suburban” population densities and land covers. We analyzed population density, extracted from the census, and vegetation abundance, derived from Landsat imagery, taking six cities in the U.S.A. as contrasting examples. Combining population density and areal vegetation abundance estimates yields univariate and bivariate distribut...

This study explores natural and anthropogenic influences on the climate system, with an emphasis on the biogeophysical and biogeochemical effects of historical land cover change. The biogeophysical effect of land cover change is first subjected to a detailed sensitivity analysis in the context of the UVic Earth System Climate Model, a global climate model of intermediate complexity. Results sho...

Land use change modifies the environment at multiple spatial scales, and is a main driver of species declines and deterioration of ecosystem services. However, most of the research on the effects of land use change has focused on taxonomic diversity, while functional diversity, an important predictor of ecosystem services, is often neglected. We explored how local and landscape scale characteri...

The Upper Guinea Forest (UGF) region of West Africa is one of the most climatically marginal and human-impacted tropical forest regions in the world. Research on the patterns and drivers of vegetation change is critical for developing strategies to sustain ecosystem services in the region and to understand how climate and land use change will affect other tropical forests around the globe. We c...

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...

BACKGROUND Monitoring land change at multiple spatial scales is essential for identifying hotspots of change, and for developing and implementing policies for conserving biodiversity and habitats. In the high diversity country of Colombia, these types of analyses are difficult because there is no consistent wall-to-wall, multi-temporal dataset for land-use and land-cover change. METHODOLOGY/P...

the rapid change of land use and land cover in the metropolitan area of tehran has influenced the distribution pattern of land surface temperature (lst). in this study, a spatial autocorrelation analysis is adopted to process the spatial-temporal changes of lst and normalized difference vegetation index (ndvi) in tehran during the period of 1987 to 2010. global spatial autocorrelation analysis ...

Global change will likely affect savanna and forest structure and distributions, with implications for diversity within both biomes. Few studies have examined the impacts of both expected precipitation and land use changes on vegetation structure in the future, despite their likely severity. Here, we modeled tree cover in sub-Saharan Africa, as a proxy for vegetation structure and land cover ch...

Detecting land cover change over semi-arid rangeland is important for monitoring vegetation responses to drought, population expansion, and changing agricultural practices. Such change can be detected using vegetation indices, but these do not represent non-green vegetation and are dominated by seasonal changes. An alternative is to observe spatial changes in thermal emissivities, a measure tha...

REIF, M.K.; MACON, C.L., and WOZENCRAFT, J.M., 2011. Post-Katrina land-cover, elevation, and volume change assessment along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, U.S.A. In: Pe’eri, S. and Long, B. (eds.), Applied LIDAR Techniques, Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 62, 30–39. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 07490208. Advances in remote-sensing technology have led to its ...