Landscape connectivity is of paramount importance not only in maintaining both functionality and resilience of social-ecological systems, but also in providing Ecosystem Services (ESs). Despite recent efforts, several issues still need to be faced to fully integrate ESs evaluation relating to landscape connectivity into effective plans and environmental assessment procedures. Choosing an appropriate scale of analysis is one of the most problematic topics, since it can profoundly affect the evaluation of single patch contribution to global connectivity.

A negotiation support system (NSS) was developed to solve groundwater conflicts that arose during land-use management. It was set up in cooperation with the stakeholders involved to provide information on the impact of land use, e.g., agriculture, nature (forested areas), recreation, and urban areas, on the quality of both infiltrating and abstracted groundwater. This NSS combined simulation programs that calculate (1) the concentrations of nitrate in shallow groundwater for each land-use area and (2) the transport of nitrate in the groundwater-saturated zone.

Spatial data quality is a paramount concern in all geographical information systems (GIS) applications. Existing standards and guidelines for spatial data commonly assume the positional error is normally distributed. While non-normal behaviour of the error in digital elevation data has been observed in previous research, current guidelines for digital elevation data still assume that the errors for observations in open terrain are normally distributed.

One of the potential applications of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is the classification of land cover, such as forest canopies, vegetation, sea ice types, and urban areas. In contrast to single or dual polarized SAR systems, full polarimetric SAR systems provide more information about the physical and geometrical properties of the imaged area. This paper proposes a new Bayes risk function which can be minimized to obtain a Likelihood Ratio (LR) for the supervised classification of polarimetric SAR data.

Human activity is one of the most important aerosol sources. Because the underlaying surface feature records most human activities, it is important to recognize the correlation between aerosol distribution and the underlaying surface.

Chongqing Municipality, located on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, is one of China’s four largest megacities, comparable with Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. In recent years, Chongqing and its surroundings have been experiencing severe environmental problems, such as urbanization, pollution, and deforestation, due to the rapid economic development of China’s inland region.

Based on the fact that streamwater quality reflects landscape conditions, the objectives of this study were: to investigate nitrogen (N), carbon (C), and major ion concentrations in six streams crossing minimally disturbed Atlantic Forest areas, with similar geomorphological characteristics; to determine N and C fluxes in one of these pristine streams (Indaiá); and assess the impact of human activity on the biogeochemistry of two other streams in the same region, crossing urbanized areas.

The USDA initiated the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to quantify the environmental benefits of conservation practices at regional and national scales. For this assessment, a sampling and modeling approach is used. This paper provides a technical overview of the modeling approach used in CEAP cropland assessment to estimate the off-site water quality benefits of conservation practices using the Ohio River Basin (ORB) as an example.

Most impacts on providing ecosystem services (ESs) are related to land use changes that may cause ecosystem fragmentation and loss of ecosystem functions. Spatial planning, focusing on sustainable landscape development, should consider the local potential for providing ESs as well possible impacts due to land use changes. The results of a large number of recent studies on ES assessment are difficult to replicate and integrate into landscape planning or definition of land use policies.

There are both semantic and technical differences between land use (LU) and land cover (LC) measurements. In cartographic approaches, these differences are often neglected, giving rise to a hybrid classification. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding and characterization of the two classification schemes using a comparison that allows maximization of the informative power of both. The analysis was carried out in the Molise region (Central Italy) using sample information from the Italian Land Use Inventory (IUTI).

Changes in land use and land tenure can influence both physical fragmentation and ownership fragmentation of landscapes, with implications for biodiversity. In this study, we evaluated changes in land use and land tenure in the Tijuana River Watershed, a region of high biodiversity and endemism, following the implementation of a new Agrarian Law which allowed for privatization and sales of communal land (ejidos) beginning in 1992. In order to understand changes in land use and cover, we constructed maps from aerial photographs and Aster images and measured changes between 1994 and 2005.