This study spatially assesses, quantifies, and visualizes the agricultural expansion and land use intensification in the northwestern foothills of Mount Kenya over the last 30 years: processes triggered by population growth, and, more recently, by large-scale commercial investments. We made use of Google Earth Engine to access the USGS Landsat data archive and to generate cloud-free seasonal co...

land evaluation is the process of predicting the land use potential on the basis of its attributes. at the present study the qualitative land suitability evaluation was investigated for specific cereal crops including irrigated wheat (triticum aestivum l.), mays (zea mays l.) and cotton (gossypium herbaceum l.), based on fao land evaluation frame works (1976, 1983 and1985), climatic and soil re...

Cropland mapping relies heavily on field data for algorithm calibration, making it, in many cases, applicable only at the field campaign scale. While the recently launched Sentinel-2 satellite will be able to deliver time series over large regions, it will not really be compatible with the current mapping approach or the available in situ data. This research introduces a generic methodology for...

We studied the impacts of anthropogenic changes in land use on the stoichiometric imbalance of soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) in Phragmites australis wetlands in the Minjiang River estuary. We compared five areas with different land uses: P. australis wetland (control), grassland, a mudskipper breeding flat, pond aquaculture and rice cropland. Human activity has...

Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) are important tools for modelling impacts of global change on ecosystem services. However, most models do not take full account of human land management and land use and land cover changes (LULCCs). We integrated croplands and pasture and their management and natural vegetation recovery and succession following cropland abandonment into the LPJ-GUESS DGV...

This study examines landscape changes in the context of China's national Grain for Green (GFG) policy, one of the world's largest "payment for environmental/ecosystem services" (PES) programs. We explored landscape structures and dynamics between 2000 and 2010 in Shaanxi Province, the Chinese province with the greatest amount of cropland conversion and reforestation in recent decades. We used L...

A key factor in the implementation of productive and sustainable cultivation procedures is the frequent and area-wide monitoring of cropland and grassland. In particular, attention is focused on assessing the actual status, identifying basic trends and mitigating major threats with respect to land-use intensity and its changes in agricultural and semi-natural areas. Here, multi-seasonal analyse...

Earth’s land cover has been extensively transformed over time due to both human activities and natural causes. Previous global studies have focused on developing spatial and temporal patterns of dominant human land-use activities (e.g., cropland, pastureland, urban land, wood harvest). Process-based modeling studies adopt different strategies to estimate the changes in land cover by using these...