Projections of land cover change generated from integrated assessment models (IAM) and other economic-based models can be applied for analyses of environmental impacts at sub-regional and landscape scales. For those IAM and economic models that project land cover change at the continental or regional scale, these projections must be downscaled and spatially distributed prior to use in climate o...

The introduction and advancement of spatial information technologies such as remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) have provided many (software) tools that assist in natural resource planning and management. GIS technology has particularly provided many cost-effective tools for evaluating land use/land cover (LU/LC) and the implications of different land use practices within a...

Rapid urbanization changes the land use/land cover pattern of a developing region. Due to these land surface changes, stream flow of the rivers also changes. It is important to investigate the factors affecting hydrological characteristics of the river basin for better river basin management planning. This study is aimed to understand the effect of Land Use/Land Cover (LU/LC) changes on stream ...

Global change will likely affect savanna and forest structure and distributions, with implications for diversity within both biomes. Few studies have examined the impacts of both expected precipitation and land use changes on vegetation structure in the future, despite their likely severity. Here, we modeled tree cover in sub-Saharan Africa, as a proxy for vegetation structure and land cover ch...

Climate and land cover change are driving a major reorganization of terrestrial biotic communities in tropical ecosystems. In an effort to understand how biodiversity patterns in the tropics will respond to individual and combined effects of these two drivers of environmental change, we use species distribution models (SDMs) calibrated for recent climate and land cover variables and projected t...

We developed a Sub-pixel Imperviousness Change Detection (SICD) approach to detect urban land-cover changes using Landsat and high-resolution imagery. The sub-pixel percent imperviousness was mapped for two dates (09 March 1993 and 11 March 2001) over western Georgia using a regression tree algorithm. The accuracy of the predicted imperviousness was reasonable based on a comparison using indepe...

Guangzhou city in South China has experienced an accelerated urban development since the 1980s. This paper examines the impact of the urban development on urban heat islands through a historical analysis of urban-rural air temperature differences. Remote sensing techniques were applied to derive information on land use/cover and land surface temperatures and to assess the thermal response patte...

abstract:â green spaces, especially urban gardens have been a subject of study in many countries for a long time, but the subject has been mostly overlooked in iran. therefore, this study tries to analyze the changes in land use and how we can protect green spaces (gardens) in jahrom in line with sustainable development in 1996-2006. the data in this study were collected through local investiga...

Understanding the processes of land use and land cover changes (LUCC) and the associated driving forces is important for achieving sustainable development. This paper presents the LUCC in Portugal at the regional level (NUTS II) from 1995 to 2010 and discusses the main driving forces and implications associated with these LUCC. The main objectives of this work are: (a) to quantify the land use ...