In remote sensing studies of land surface temperatures (LST), thematic land-use and land-cover (LULC) data are frequently employed for simple correlation analyses between LULC types and their thermal signatures. Development of quantitative surface descriptors could improve our capabilities for modeling urban thermal landscapes and advance urban climate research. This study developed an analytic...

Grabbing of pastoralists’ traditional land to put it under the commercial farming system, which has widely been adopted as a development and investment strategy in Sudan, is creating a cruel dilemma of increasing both resource conflict and environmental degradation. This is one of the fundamental reasons that the country has earned the reputation as a home of bloody c...

Object-based image analysis (OBIA) is becoming an increasingly common method for producing land use/land cover (LULC) classifications in urban areas. In order to produce the most accurate LULC map, LiDAR data and postclassification procedures are often employed, but their relative contributions to accuracy are unclear. We examined the contribution of LiDAR data and postclassification procedures...

In-depth understanding about the vertical distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) density is crucial for carbon (C) accounting, C budgeting and designing appropriate C sequestration strategies. We examined the vertical distribution of SOC density under different land use/land cover (LULC) types, altitudinal zones and aspect directions in a montane ecosystem of Bhutan. Sampling sites were loca...

The Heihe River Basin (HRB) is the second largest inland river basin in arid Northwest China. The expanding agricultural irrigation, growing industrialization, and increasing urban development in the middle reach have depleted much of the river flow to the lower reach, degrading the corresponding ecosystems. Since the enactment of the State Council of China's new HRB water allocation policy in ...

Urbanization has been known to alter the hydrologic characteristics of a watershed. This study empirically assesses this notion by investigating the relationship of developed land use/land cover (LULC) changes and surface runoff generation. We examine the Cypress Creek watershed, where its recent development pressure is significantly high due to the rapid growth of Houston, Texas. The watershed...

Knowledge of the floral cycle and the spatial distribution and abundance of flowering plants is important for bee health studies to understand the relationship between landscape and bee hive productivity and honey flow. The key objective of this study was to show how AISA Eagle hyperspectral data and random forest (RF) can be optimally utilized to produce flowering and spatially explicit land u...

Vegetation patterns and spatial organization are influenced by the changing environmental conditions and human activities. However, the effect of environment on vegetation at different vegetation classification levels has been unclear. We conducted an analysis to explore the relationship between environment and vegetation in the land use/land cover (LULC), vegetation group, vegetation type, and...

Urban expansion is one of the key problems in Ethiopia resulting in displacement of the rural people inhabiting areas bordering the cities/towns. It is also resulting in land use land cover (LULC) changes affecting the livelihoods of the people and the ecosystems [1], [2]. The data presented in this article, therefore, shows the spatiotemporal LULC changes of peri-urban expansion areas known as...