Time-series data from wide-field sensors, acquired for the period of a growing season or longer, capitalize on phenological changes in vegetation and make it possible to identify vegetated land cover types in greater detail. Our objective was to examine the utility of time-series data to rapidly update maps of vegetation condition and land cover change in Mexico as an input to biodiversity mode...

A land surface scheme with and without groundwater–vegetation interactions is used to explore the impact of rainfall variability on transpiration over drought-vulnerable regions of southeastern Australia. The authors demonstrate that if groundwater is included in the simulations, there is a low correlation between rainfall variability and the response of transpiration to this variability over f...

There is a global increase in the recognition of environmental, social and economic values of native vegetation, particularly in terms of both sustainability of agricultural production and maintenance of natural resources. The rapid growth of the human population in Sudan (2.6 % per year) stimulated the evolution of mechanized agriculture in the Gedarif Area from 500 ha in the 1940s to about 2....

In Australia, remotely sensed Landsat TM data is routinely used for mapping and monitoring the change in extent of woody perennial vegetation cover providing information for conservation, land management and for modelling carbon flux and water use. For a variety of reasons including land cover definitions and sensor spectral limitations, studies have tended to focus on reporting changes in land...

Urban heat islands are characterized by high land surface temperature, low humidity, and poor vegetation, and considered to favor the transmission of the mosquito-borne dengue fever that is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. We analyzed the recorded dengue incidence in Sao Paulo city, Brazil, in 2010-2011, in terms of multiple environmental and socioeconomic variables. Geographical info...

In the presented methodology, multitemporal Landsat images were used to develop enhanced information about complex assemblages of vegetation and patterns of seasonal land cover variability, thereby facilitating improved land use and land cover (LULC) classification of urbanized areas among sensitive environments along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. For Landsat-5 and Landsat-7 images acquired for l...

In the western United States, more than 79000 km has been converted to irrigated agriculture and urban areas. These changes have the potential to alter surface temperature by modifying the energy budget at the land–atmosphere interface. This study reports the seasonally varying temperature responses of four regional climate models (RCMs) – RSM, RegCM3, MM5-CLM3, and DRCM – to conversion of pote...

Multispectral satellite images have been utilized in the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) for crop cover classification and crop acreage estimation since the 1970's. Though ancillary data is utilized to enhance the classification accuracy, there are few applications that maximize the utilization of the feature information of the given multispectral images. Every multispectral ima...

[1] While it is generally believed that the magnitude and composition of vegetation cover influence land-atmosphere water and carbon fluxes, observations indicate that in some cases, fluxes are insensitive to land cover contrasts. This seeming inconsistency may be resolved by contrasting fluxes over short and long timescales. To explore this potential contrast, we developed and tested a model d...