A fundamental step in conserving biodiversity is identification of quality habitat needed to sustain populations of target species. We used coarse scale environmental features (soil water holding capacity, soil texture, slope, elevation, and proximity to drainage channels) to predict habitat suitability for four species of desert amphibians in Big Bend National Park, USA: Scaphiopus couchii, Bu...

Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear...

The Ipswich watershed in northeastern Massachusetts, USA, is experiencing important land-use changes, which are contributing to severe environmental problems such as eutrophication, ground water depletion and loss of wildlife. The objective of this paper is to model deforestation between 1971, 1985 and 1991 in the watershed of the Ipswich River in Massachusetts, USA, where most of the forest lo...

Land use planning and ecological land evaluation are considered the most important tools and factors of sustainable development. Two aspects are of importance, firstly the potential suitability of the land for a specific use and the secondly management practices that integrate various factors such as agro-ecological aptitude, environmental impact, hydro-climate conditions and socioeconomic cons...

Extensive livestock grazing even in unsuitable land has increasingly grown in most parts of semi-arid rangeland. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to identify suitable land for livestock grazing for optimum utilization while causing minimum impact to the environment. This paper adapted the schematic model based on the concepts presented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of suitabi...

The acquisition of digital spatial data is a key economical factor in GIS projects. Transforming analog graphic data by manual digitizing is slow and therefore extremely expensive. The work reported here investigates the possibility of applying the Keystroke-Level Model to the modeling and optimization of manual digitizing tasks. This model predicts the time it takes an experienced user to perf...

Predictions from individual distribution models for Mexican Geotrupinae species were overlaid to obtain a total species richness map for this group. A database (GEOMEX) that compiles available information from the literature and from several entomological collections was used. A Maximum Entropy method (MaxEnt) was applied to estimate the distribution of each species, taking into account 19 clim...

Rift Valley fever (RVF), a mosquito-borne disease affecting ruminants and humans, is one of the most important viral zoonoses in Africa. The objective of the present study was to develop a geographic knowledge-based method to map the areas suitable for RVF amplification and RVF spread in four East African countries, namely, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia, and to assess the predictive accu...

With the depletion of traditional energy sources, which are defined as fossil fuels, importance renewable sources has increased even more. Renewable is a sustainable source that can be reproduced with use existing resources and almost no harm to environment. Solar one leading types among an inexhaustible for humanity used generations. Selecting appropriate site installation solar power plants i...