Google Earth (GE) releases free images in high spatial resolution that may provide some potential for regional land use/cover mapping, especially for those regions with high heterogeneous landscapes. In order to test such practicability, the GE imagery was selected for a case study in Wuhan City to perform an object-based land use/cover classification. The classification accuracy was assessed b...

Mollusca are the second largest phylum of the animal kingdom, forming a major part of the world fauna. The Gastropoda is the only class of molluscs which have successfully invaded land. They are one of the most diverse groups of animals, both in shape and habit. Among gastropods, land snails (subclass: Pulmonata) are one of the most numerous with almost 35,000 described species of the world. Th...

Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological and environmental balance of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the most populous metropolitan area in Canada, in the past three decades. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between landscape change and population increase patterns as well as to evaluate ecological impacts of urbanization in the GTA.Multi-temporal re...

Predicting species distributions at scales of regions to continents is often necessary, as largescale phenomena influence the distributions of spatially structured populations. Land use and land cover are important large-scale drivers of species distributions, and landscapes are known to create species occurrence thresholds, where small changes in a landscape characteristic results in abrupt ch...

The emergence of ‘flex crops and commodities’ within a fluid international food regime transition, the rise of BRICS and middle-income countries, and the revalued role of nation-states are critical context for land grabbing. These global transformations that shape and are reshaped by contemporary land grabbing have resulted in the emergence of competing interpretations of the meaning of such ch...

Landscape dynamics are common phenomenon in the human-dominated environments whereby it can be observed that the composition and configuration between landscape elements change over time. This dynamism brings about habitat loss and fragmentation that can greatly alter ecosystem services at patch, class, and landscape levels. We conducted a study to examine composition and configuration of fores...

Land-use conversion into bioenergy crop production can alter litter decomposition processes tightly coupled to soil carbon and nutrient dynamics. Yet, litter decomposition has been poorly described in bioenergy production systems, especially following land-use conversion. Predicting decomposition dynamics in postconversion bioenergy production systems is challenging because of the combined infl...