Accurate information on cropland extent is critical for scientific research and resource management. Several cropland products from remotely sensed datasets are available. Nevertheless, significant inconsistency exists among these products and the cropland areas estimated from these products differ considerably from statistics. In this study, we propose a hierarchical optimization synergy appro...

While we know that deforestation in the tropics is increasingly driven by commercial agriculture, most tropical countries still lack recent and spatially-explicit assessments of the relative importance of pasture and cropland expansion in causing forest loss. Here we present a spatially explicit quantification of the extent to which cultivated land and grassland expanded at the expense of fores...

The situation of cropland use in China is very complicated. In many areas, the cropland is used in multi-cropped ways. There is a need for better information on the area and distribution of cropland using in different cropping rotation systems, but it is not easy to get it in traditional census ways. This paper focuses on the methodology of crop rotations detection in China using multitemporal ...

The hydrological response to land cover changes induced by human activities in arid regions has attracted increased research interest in recent decades. The study reported herein assessed the spatial and quantitative changes in surface runoff resulting from land cover change in the Al-Baha region of Saudi Arabia between 1990 and 2000 using an ArcGIS-surface runoff model and predicted land cover...

Land suitability analysis, commonly known as land evaluation, is considered an interface between land resourcesurvey and land use planning and management. Land evaluation be carried out to estimate the suitability of land fora specific use such as arable farming or irrigated agriculture. There are several established techniques for generatingland suitability evaluation. This research was carrie...

Intensive mechanized agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon grew by >3.6 million hectares (ha) during 2001-2004. Whether this cropland expansion resulted from intensified use of land previously cleared for cattle ranching or new deforestation has not been quantified and has major implications for future deforestation dynamics, carbon fluxes, forest fragmentation, and other ecosystem services. We c...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a 30 m resolution crop-specific land cover map produced annually to assess crops and cropland area across the conterminous United States. Despite its prominent use value for monitoring agricultural use/land (LULC), there remains substantial uncertainty surrounding CDLs’ performance, particularly in applications measuring L...

Global increases in both agriculture and biodiversity awareness raise a key question: Should cropland and biodiversity habitat be separated, or integrated in mixed land uses? Ecosystem services by wildlife make this question more complex. For example, birds benefit agriculture by preying on pest insects, but other habitat is needed to maintain the birds. Resulting land use questions include wha...