The Sahel has been the focus of scientific interest in environmental-human dynamics and interactions. The objective of the present study is to contribute to the recent debate on the re-greening of Sahel. The paper examines the dynamics of barren land in the Sahel of Burkina Faso through analysis of remotely-sensed and rainfall data from 1975–2011. Discussions with farmers and land management st...

As the barren lands play a key role in the interaction between land cover dynamics and climate system, an efficient methodology for the global-scale extraction and mapping of the barren lands is important. The discriminative potential of the existing soil/bareness indexes was assessed by collecting globally distributed reference data belonging to major land cover types. The existing soil/barene...

Sensitivity of surface climate change to land types is investigated for the Northern Hemisphere by subtracting the reanalysis from the observed surface temperature (observation minus reanalysis). The basis of this approach is that while reanalysis represents the large-scale climate changes due to greenhouse gases and atmospheric circulation, it is less sensitive to regional surface processes as...

Land cover characterization at a regional scale using spaceborne multi-angle remote sensing data is in its infancy. A data mining technique was employed to evaluate the degree to which the accuracy of land cover classification can be increased using multi-spectral, multi-temporal and multi-angle remote sensing data. The study area is around the Jornada Rangeland in New Mexico, USA with shrublan...

We tested the Moment Distance Index (MDI) in combination with texture features for the summer vegetation mapping in the eastern Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan using the 2014 Landsat OLI (Operational Land Imager) image. The five major classes identified were sparse vegetation, medium-dense vegetation, dense vegetation, barren land, and water bodies. By utilizing object features in a random forest (...

Landsat MSS and ETM+ images were analyzed to detect 25-year land-cover change (1976–2001) in the critical Taguibo Watershed in Mindanao Island, Southern Philippines. This watershed has experienced historical modifications of its land-cover due to the presence of logging industries in the 1950s, and continuous deforestation due to illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture in the present tim...

We analyzed Landsat MSS and ETM+ images to detect 25-year land-cover change (1976-2001) in the critical Taguibo Watershed in Mindanao Island, Southern Philippines. This watershed has experienced historical modifications of its land-cover due to the presence of logging industries in the 1960s, and continuous deforestation due to illegal logging and slash-and-burn agriculture in the present time....

Lichens form a critical portion of barren ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) diets, especially during winter months. Here, we assess lichen mat volume across five herd ranges in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, Canada, using newly developed composite Landsat imagery. The lichen volume estimator (LVE) was adapted for use across 700 000 km2 of barren ground caribou habitat ann...

This study aims to determine the accuracy level at which different forms of land degradation can be mapped from medium-resolution satellite data, and to assess how accurately degraded land can be detected from multi-temporal satellite images. Land degradation in the form of salinization and waterlogging in Tongyu County, western Jilin Province of Northeast China was mapped from Landsat TM and A...