Nepal, with an area of 147,181 square kilometers (km), is a land of enormous geographical diversity. The country has three main geographical/ecological regions: the terai region, the hill region and the mountain region, which cover 23.1 percent, 41.7 percent, and 35.2 percent of the total area, respectively. Each ecological region is a narrow strip of land stretching from east to west. These th...

Landscape dynamics are common phenomenon in the human-dominated environments whereby it can be observed that the composition and configuration between landscape elements change over time. This dynamism brings about habitat loss and fragmentation that can greatly alter ecosystem services at patch, class, and landscape levels. We conducted a study to examine composition and configuration of fores...

The SLEUTH urban growth model [1] is a cellular automata model that has been widely applied throughout the geographic literature to examine the historic settlement patterns of cities and to forecast their future growth. In this research, the ability of the model to replicate historical patterns of land use is examined by calibrating the model to fit historical data with 5, 10, and 15 different ...

We estimate the effect of malaria on settlement and land use patterns in the Brazilian Amazon, where potential settlers were randomly assigned to plots in a newly opened settlement area. The random assignment allows us to estimate the risk of malaria on each plot based only on its characteristics. Using survey data, we find that a high malaria risk significantly reduces the probability that a p...

Land-use change in the U.S. Great Plains since agricultural settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century has been well documented. While aggregate historical trends are easily tracked, the decision-making of individual farmers is difficult to reconstruct. We use an agent-based model to tell the history of the settlement of the West by simulating farm-level agricultural decision makin...

Classifying remote sensing imageries to obtain reliable and accurate LandUse/Cover (LUC) information still remains a challenge that depends on many factors suchas complexity of landscape especially in arid region. The aim of this paper is to extractreliable LUC information from Land sat imageries of the Pishkouh watershed of centralarid region, Iran. The classical Maximum Likelihood Classifier ...

Undoubtedly, land degradation linked to desertification causes a decrease in qualitative and quantitative features of natural resources. This research aimed to assess land desertification by local residents and their role in controlling desertification in Isfahan province, Iran in 2016. The criteria were soil climate, vegetation, erosion, and demography. The indicators of soil texture, stone fr...

extended abstract 1. introduction land use suitability assessment is necessary to prevent and imporove environmental issues. land use planning provides a basis for decision making in spatial planning and land-use management. selecting the appropriate land-use type and pattern according to ecological suitability of lands is the main purpose of watershed management and can lead to the control and...

The relative importance of deterministic and stochastic processes driving patterns of human settlement remains controversial. A main reason for this is that disentangling the drivers of distributions and geographic clustering at different spatial scales is not straightforward and powerful analytical toolboxes able to deal with this type of data are largely deficient. Here we use a multivariate ...