Under the prevailing variable natural conditions nomadic pastoralism was the most suitable form of land use in Mongolia and the neighboring countries in the past. Furthermore, small areas were used for agriculture in some regions. Therefore, anthropogenic influence was present throughout history. In the forest steppe zone this led to the disappearance of forest sites which then gave way to mead...

the normalized difference vegetation index (ndvi) derived from the spot 4 satellite has been widely used to monitor moisture-related vegetation condition. the relationship between vegetation and climate index, however, is complex and has not been adequately studied with satellite sensor data. to better understand this relationship, an analysis was conducted on time series of monthly ndvi (1999–...

Land use/cover trends in the Keiskamma catchment were investigated using Multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery from 1972 to 2006. Object-oriented post-classification comparison and fragmentation analyses were performed; and the Landscape-Function analysis was used to assess the current rangeland condition of proximal hillslopes and the riparian zone. Temporal land use/cover analyses revealed...

abstract decadal changes in land use/land cover for balachaur watershed in nawanshahar district, punjab, india were studied using black and white aerial photographs for march 1984 on approximately 1:20,000 scale and multidate geocoded false colour composites (fcc) of irs-1d liss-iii on 1:50,000 scale for march 2002, september 2002, and may 2003 and interpreted visually to prepare land use/land ...

Widespread anthropogenic land cover change over the last five centuries has influenced the global climate system through both biogeochemical and biophysical processes. Models indicate that warming from carbon emissions associated with land cover conversion has been partially offset by cooling from elevated albedo, but considerable uncertainty remains partly because of uncertainty in model treat...

Earth's land surface teems with life. Although the distribution of ecosystems is largely explained by temperature and precipitation, vegetation can vary markedly with little variation in climate. Here we explore the role of bedrock in governing the distribution of forest cover across the Sierra Nevada Batholith, California. Our sites span a narrow range of elevations and thus a narrow range in ...

As an alternative to the traditional approach of using predeŽ ned classiŽ cation schemes with discrete numbers of cover types to describe the geographic distribution of vegetation over the Earth’s land surface, we apply a linear mixture model to derive global continuous Ž elds of percentage woody vegetation, herbaceous vegetation and bare ground from 8 km Advanced Very High Resolution Radiomete...

Satellite-derived thermal information over urban areas offers and attractive and inexpensive method which have been utilized in diverse studies including land cover classification, energy flux interactions, and as input for models of urban surface atmosphere exchange. In this study, we utilize Landsat ETM+ imagery to analyze the dependence of energy fluxes on the urban surface properties in Yor...

Rapid urbanization has occurred in northwestern China, threatening the sustainability of its fragile dryland ecosystems. A lack of precise urban land-cover information has limited our understanding on the urbanization in the dryland. Here, we examined urban land-cover changes from 2000 to 2014 in 21 major cities that comprise over 50% of the developed land in arid China, using Landsat Enhanced ...