Greenbelts are the best-known growth management policies in Germany. As part of its regional plans, they attempt to keep undeveloped areas permanently open, thus avoiding sprawling, i.e., land consumptive forms of urban development. However, the effectiveness of such land use designations in terms of guiding and limiting urban growth has rarely been the subject of in-depth research. This is the first study to present a GIS-based analysis of the restrictiveness of greenbelt designations in Germany and their impact on urban spatial structure and land use.

In this article, we provide a synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature and state and federal policies focused on absentee landowners of forestland, rangeland, or farmland in the U.S. The synthesis indicates absentee owners, as compared to those living on the land, appear to be much more likely to live in urban areas, are less dependent financially upon the land and much more likely to own land for amenity reasons than production purposes.

We assessed bird diversity and nesting activity in 54 urban parks in the core of a highly populated East-Asian tropical city to investigate the effects of area, isolation, habitat heterogeneity, and human disturbances on avifauna. Tree density and heterogeneity were lower while isolation was greater in small than in large or medium-sized parks.

Aim This paper describes the development of novel indices of bird‐habitat preference to examine bird species’ use of habitats and their distributions relative to habitats. It assesses the implications for bird conservation regionally and the scope for biodiversity assessments generally. Location A 200 km by 400 km area of farmland with seminatural and urban areas, covering south‐eastern England. Methods Cluster analysis was used to link birds to landscapes. Cluster centroid coordinate values were processed to derive indices of bird‐habitat preference.

Countries around the world have responded to the problems associated with rapid urban growth and increasingly land-consumptive development patterns by creating a wide range of policy instruments designed to manage urban growth. Of the array of growth management techniques, urban containment policies are considered by some to be a promising approach. This paper focuses on greenbelts, the most restrictive form of urban containment policy. The long-standing greenbelt of Seoul, Republic of Korea is examined as a case study.

In this paper a new approach for fractal based dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral data has been proposed. The features have been generated by multiplying variogram fractal dimension value with spectral energy. Fractal dimension bears the information related to the shape or characteristic of the spectral response curves and the spectral energy bears the information related to class separation.

Rapid land use/land cover changes have taken place in many cities of Turkey. Land use and land cover changes are essential for wide range of applications. In this study, Landsat TM satellite imageries date from 1987, 1993, 2000 and 2010 were used to analyse temporal and spatial changes in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey. Zonguldak and Eregli two largest and economic important cities which have been active coal mining and iron fabric areas.

Urban areas are the most dynamic region on earth. Their size has been constantly increased during the past and this process will go on in the future. Since there is no standard policy and guidelines for construction of buildings and urban planning, cities tend to have irregular growth. Many cities in the world face the problem of urban sprawl in its suburbs. So issues of urban sprawl need to be settled with the help of technologies such as satellite remote sensing and automated change detection.

This paper examines the potential effects of urbanization on streamflow in Maine, USA, from 1950 to 2000. The study contrasts nine watersheds in southern Maine, which has seen steady urban growth over the study period, with nine rural watersheds from northern Maine. Historical population data and current land cover data are used to develop an urbanization score for each watershed. Trends in watershed urbanization over the study period are compared to trends in ecologically relevant streamflow characteristics.

Socioeconomic growth and urban change have been an increasing concern for decision makers in recent decades. The monitoring, mapping, and analysis of agricultural land use change, especially in areas where urban change has been high, is crucial. The collision between traditional economic activities related to agriculture in tourist areas such as the Algarve and current demand for tourism infrastructures in urban regions is also leading to loss of economic activity.

With the availability of very high resolution multispectral imagery, it is possible to identify small features in urban environment. Because of the multiscale feature and diverse composition of land cover types found within the urban environment, the production of accurate urban land cover maps from high resolution satellite imagery is a difficult task. This paper demonstrates the potential of 8 bands capability of World View 2 satellite for better automated feature extraction and discrimination studies.