The Heihe River Basin (HRB) is a typical arid inland river basin in northwestern China. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the downstream flow in the HRB declined as a result of large, artificial changes in the distribution of water and land and a lack of effective water resource management. Consequently, the ecosystems of the lower reaches of the basin substantially deteriorated. To restore these de...

Land use/land cover (LULC) has a profound impact on economy, society and environment, especially in rapid developing areas. Rapid and prompt monitoring and predicting of LULC's change are crucial and significant. Currently, integration of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) methods is one of the most important methods for detecting LULC's change, which includes image p...

Remotely sensed data is the most important data source for environmental change study over the past 40 years. Since large collections of remote sensing imagery have been acquired in a time frame of successive years, it is now possible to study long-term spatio-temporal pattern of environmental change and impacts of human activities. This study seeks an efficient and practical methodology for la...

In human-modified environments, ecological traps may result from a preference for low-quality habitat where survival or reproductive success is lower than in high-quality habitat. It has often been shown that low reproductive success for birds in preferred habitat types was due to higher nest predator abundance. However, between-habitat differences in nest predation may only weakly correlate wi...

Like many other coastal regions of the world, open-soil agricultural lands in the Fraser River Delta provide roosting and feeding habitat for non-breeding shorebirds that supplements intertidal habitat. Focusing on dunlin (Calidris alpina pacifica), black-bellied plover (Pluvialis squatorola), killdeer (Charadrius vociferus), and their avian predators (raptors), diurnal and nocturnal high tide ...

Economic pressures from increased commodity prices and the growing demand for land for biomass plantations led to the abolition of compulsory set-aside fields in the European Union in 2008, affecting ca. 10% of total agricultural area. This area is now managed more intensively, and this is expected to adversely affect farmland biodiversity. Unfortunately, no mitigation of set-aside loss was int...

We examined the effects of land cover type on survivorship and productivity of Anopheles gambiae in Kakamega in the western Kenyan highlands (elevation = 1,420-1,580 meters above sea level). Under natural conditions, An. gambiae sensu lato adults emerged only from farmland habitats, with an estimated productivity of 1.82 mosquitoes/meter(2)/week, but not from forest and swamp habitats. To deter...

Conserving biodiversity on farmland is an essential element of worldwide efforts for reversing the global biodiversity decline. Common approaches involve improving the natural component of the landscape by increasing the amount of natural and seminatural habitats (e.g., hedgerows, woodlots, and ponds) or improving the production component of the landscape by increasing the amount of biodiversit...

Areas and spatial distribution information of paddy rice are important for managing food security, water use, and climate change. However, there are many difficulties in mapping paddy rice, especially mapping multi-season paddy rice in rainy regions, including differences in phenology, the influence of weather, and farmland fragmentation. To resolve these problems, a novel multi-season paddy ri...

Land use and land cover change is driven by multiple influential factors from environmental and social dimensions in a land system. Land use practices of human decision-makers modify the landscape of the land system, possibly leading to landscape fragmentation, biodiversity loss, or environmental pollution-severe environmental or ecological impacts. While landscape-level ecological risk assessm...