Statewide land cover change detection analysis provides a useful tool for conservation planning and environmental monitoring and addresses issues of habitat fragmentation and urban sprawl. Furthermore, using historical and recent land cover data offers two perspectives on landscape dynamics. To this end, the first alliance level land cover map of Kansas recently completed by the KARS Program wa...

this study examines the relationship between land use/land cover (lulc) changes and surface runoff generation empirically to reveal how urbanization has altered the hydrologic characteristics of a watershed. a hydrological model, the soil and water assessment tool (swat), is employed to estimate the watershed runoff generation for two lulc scenarios from 2002 to 2010. the cypress creek watershe...

Urban ecosystem assessments increasingly rely on widely available map products, such as the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) National Land Cover Database (NLCD), and datasets that use generic classification schemes to detect and model large-scale impacts of land-cover change. However, utilizing existing map products or schemes without identifying relevant urban class types such as semi-natural, y...

This study demonstrates the ability of GIS and Remote Sensing in capturing spatial-temporal data on land use and land cover classes. The nine land cover classes captured were Built-up area, Secondary forests, Savannah, Grasslands, and Shrublands containing herbaceous, Rain-fed shrub crops, Fresh water swamps, Water bodies, and Farmlands. The remote sensed imageries also displayed how the land u...

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...

L and-use change in the United States represents an enormous uncontrolled experiment in the ways habitat changes influence plants and animals. When cities were built, land was plowed, or forests were cut, the effects on our native biota were not considered. Of course, humans have influenced the flora and fauna of North America over the ages. Native Americans established settlements, practiced a...

Meta-analyses reveal that nutrient yields tend to be higher for watersheds dominated by anthropogenic uses (e.g., urban, agriculture) and lower for watersheds dominated by natural vegetation. One implication of this pattern is that loss of natural vegetation will produce increases in watershed nutrient yields. Yet, the same meta-analyses also reveal that, absent land-cover change, watershed nut...

Climate and land cover change are driving a major reorganization of terrestrial biotic communities in tropical ecosystems. In an effort to understand how biodiversity patterns in the tropics will respond to individual and combined effects of these two drivers of environmental change, we use species distribution models (SDMs) calibrated for recent climate and land cover variables and projected t...

Rainfall patterns and land cover are two important factors that affect the runoff generation process. To determine the surface and subsurface flows associated with different rainfall patterns on sloping Ferralsols under different land cover types, observational data related to surface and subsurface flows from 5 m × 15 m plots were collected from 2010 to 2012. The experiment was conducted to as...