Describing urban terrain and land use/land cover (LULC) characteristics accurately is an essential element in environmental modeling, assessment and management. Urban terrain and LULC information are especially important in meteorological modeling applications, such as simulations of atmospheric flow over cities, defining surface energy budgets, and fate and transport studies of urban contamina...

The rapid economic development resulting from Chinese economic reform has greatly accelerated urbanization and industrialization, thus leading to alterations in the natural landscape. Understanding the extent of these changes is important for regional sustainable land management. An integrated approach with a geographic information system and remote sensing was used to extract land use/land cov...

The spatial distribution of population is closely related to land use and land cover (LULC) patterns on both regional and global scales. Population can be redistributed onto geo-referenced square grids according to this relation. In the past decades, various approaches to monitoring LULC using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been developed, which makes it possible f...

This study examines how land-use errors from the Land Transformation Model (LTM) propagate through to climate as simulated by the Regional Atmospheric Model System (RAMS). The authors conducted five simulations of regional climate over East Africa: one using observed land cover/land use (LULC) and four utilizing LTM-derived LULC. The study examined how quantifiable errors generated by the LTM i...

Land-surface processes are one of the important drivers for weather and climate systems over the tropics. Realistic representation of land surface processes in mesoscale models over the region will help accurate simulation of numerical forecasts. The present study examines the influence of Land Use/ Land Cover Change (LULC) on the forecasting of cyclone intensity and track prediction using Meso...

In the land use and land cover (LULC) literature, narrative scenarios are qualitative descriptions of plausible futures associated with a combination of socio-economic, policy, technological, and climate changes. LULC models are then often used to translate these narrative descriptions into quantitative characterizations of possible future societal and ecological impacts and conditions. To resp...

The recent rise in Brazilian soybean production has generated concern among the environmental community and some authors that natural tropical environments of the Amazon Basin are being converted to soybean fields. Proponents of soybean production counter that soybeans represent a viable agricultural commodity for the region; environmental concern is unwarranted, because new soybean fields are ...

Land cover, a critical variable in the epidemiology of kala-azar, can be remotely characterized by customizing and integrating "state-of-the-art" imagery at different spatial scales from different sensors onboard satellites. A study was conducted at four levels (national, state, district and village) investigating the role of land use/land cover (LULC) for leishmaniasis transmission resulting i...

In the context of defining a procedure for near real time land use/land cover (LULC) mapping with seasonal updated products, this research examines the use of time-series and phenological indicators from MODIS NDVI. 16-day NDVI composites from MODIS (MOD13Q1) covering the period from 2001 to the present were acquired for three test sites located in different parts of Europe. The newly proposed ...

[1] In recent decades, the RockyMountainWest has been one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. Headwater streams in mountain environments may be particularly susceptible to nitrogen enrichment from residential and resort development. We utilized stream water chemistry from six synoptic sampling campaigns combined with land use/land cover (LULC) and terrain analysis in geostatist...