Decadal to centennial land use and land cover change has been consistently singled out as a key element and an important driver of global environmental change, playing an essential role in balancing energy use. Understanding long-term human-environment interactions requires historical reconstruction of past land use and land cover changes. Most of the existing historical reconstructions have in...

Problem statement: Land use change has transformed a vast part of the natural landscapes of the developing world for the last 50 years. Land is a fundamental factor of production and though much of the course of human history, it has been tightly coupled with economic growth. Soil erosion by water is one of the most important land degradation processes in the Mediterranean basins. The unplanned...

This study analyzes the characteristics of land use/land cover change in Jordan’s Irbid governorate, 1984–2018, and predicts future land use/land cover for 2030 and 2050 using a cellular automata-Markov model. The results inform planners and decision makers of past and current spatial dynamics of land use/land cover change and predicted urban expansion, for a better understanding and successful...

Remote sensing can be used to rapidly generate land use maps for assisting emergency response personnel with resource deployment decisions and impact assessments. In this study we focus on constructing accurate land cover maps to map the impacted area in the case of a nuclear material release. The proposed methodology involves integration of results from two different approaches to increase cla...

Land use may be regarded as one of the most important factors affecting theenvironment with respect to human activities. So far, destroying the rangelands andchanging them into the waste lands and poor rangelands has been proposed as the mostsignificant variations of land use done by human beings. This paper has been conducted toevaluate the variations of vegetation percentage and land uses in ...

Citizens are increasingly becoming involved in data collection, whether for scientific purposes, to carry out micro-tasks, or as part of a gamified, competitive application. In some cases, volunteered data collection overlaps with that of mapping agencies, e.g., the citizen-based mapping of features in OpenStreetMap. LUCAS (Land Use Cover Area frame Sample) is one source of authoritative in-sit...

This article presents methods to estimate a land cover transition matrix based on maps from two points in time. The land cover transition matrix indicates the amount of land that transitions from each category at time 1 to each category at time 2. Observed differences between the two land cover maps can be due to change on the ground or error in the maps. If the maps were perfectly correct, the...

The objective of this study is to assess the accuracy of various satellite-derived land cover maps classified using a hybrid pixel-based and object-based image analysis technique. A 2006 QuickBird image covering a part of the eastern side of Tsukuba City, Japan, was used to derive the land cover maps. First, we classified the image using a pixel-based technique. Second, we generated five differ...

Humans have a long history of activity in Mediterranean Basin landscapes. Spatial heterogeneity in these landscapes hinders our understanding about the impacts of changes in human activity on ecological processes, such as wildfire. The use of spatially-explicit models that simulate processes at fine scales should aid the investigation of spatial patterns at the broader, landscape scale. Here, w...