Land Cover change

Scenario and policy assessments in socioeconomic and environmental studies face significant challenges in socio-ecological systems (SES). There are a limited number of studies that have looked at the impact of different scenarios within integrated approaches, and many have used a static approach with a single driver of change. The present work analyzes the SES dynamics for a strategic basin in the Colombian Andes when implementing and analyzing scenarios and policies related to land cover and land use change using a system dynamics simulation model...

Protected areas are a key component of global conservation, and the world is aiming to increase protected areas to cover 30% of land and water through the 30 × 30 Initiative under the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. However, factors affecting their success or failure in regard to promoting mammal population recovery are not well studied, particularly using quantitative approaches comparing across diverse taxa, biomes, and countries. To better understand how protected areas contribute to mammalian recovery, we conducted an analysis of 2706 mammal populations both inside and outside of protected areas worldwide...

Urbanization changes land cover through the expansion of impermeable surfaces, leading to a significant rise in runoff, sediment, and nutrient loading. The quality of stormwater is related to land use and is highly variable. Currently, stormwater is predominantly described through watershed models that rely minimally, if at all, on field monitoring data. The simple event mean concentration (EMC) wash-off approach by land use is a common method for estimating urban runoff loads. However, a major drawback of the EMC approach is it assumes concentration remains constant across events for a specific land use...

Although saltmarshes are critical coastal ecosystems they are threatened by human activities and sea-level rise (SLR). Long-term restoration and management strategies are often hampered by an insufficient understanding of the past, present, and future processes that influence tidal wetland functionality and change. As understanding vegetation distribution in relation to elevation and tidal hydroperiod is often the basis of restoration and management decisions, this study investigated the relationships between micro-topography, tidal hydroperiod, and the distribution of saltmarshes, mangroves, and unvegetated flats in a tropical estuary situated within a Great Barrier Reef Catchment in North Queensland, Australia...

Wetland vegetation and ecology of Lake Abaya in the southern Ethiopia was studied to determine floristic composition, plant community type and vegetation ecology. A total of 102 plots were laid along transects that were set up preferentially across areas where there were rapid changes in vegetation or marked environmental gradients to collect data on estimate of percentage aerial cover of plant species and environmental variables. Vegetation data was analyzed by agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis using similarity ratio as a resemblance index and Ward's linkage method...

Species are distributed in predictable ways in geographic spaces. The three principal factors that determine geographic distributions of species are biotic interactions (B), abiotic conditions (A), and dispersal ability or mobility (M). A species is expected to be present in areas that are accessible to it and that contain suitable sets of abiotic and biotic conditions for it to persist. A species' probability of presence can be quantified as a combination of responses to B, A, and M via ecological niche modeling (ENM; also frequently referred to as species distribution modeling or SDM)...

Food security is closely related to the development of human society, and the root of food production lies in cultivated land, with water conservancy as its lifeline. This study estimates the ecological water consumption of located in the arid region of Northwest China (the Karamay region and Muzat River basin) from 1990 to 2020 based on the optimized Land Surface Energy Balance Algorithm. The verification accuracy of SEBAL energy balance model is greatly improved after optimization. It was showed an increasing trend in the Karamay region and Muzat River basin, increasing at the rates of 2...

The study determined the influence of changes in land use and land cover (LULC) on land surface temperature (LST) over a 33-year period based on a medium-sized European city (Poznań, Poland). The LST was estimated from Landsat 5, 8 and Terra (MOD11A2v6) satellites. The local estimation of climate patterns was based on the Local Climate Zones (LCZ) classification utilised with the methodology proposed by the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT). Moreover, the Copernicus' imperviousness density product (IMD) was used...

The demand for mountain water resources is increasing, and their availability is threatened by climate change, emphasizing the urgency for effective protection and management. The upper Sali-Dulce watershed holds vital significance as it contributes the majority of the Sali-Dulce water resources, supporting a densely populated dry region in Northwestern Argentina, covering an area of 24,217 km2 . However, the potential impact of climate change and land use/land cover change on water yield in this watershed remains uncertain...

Forests are important ecosystems that face threats from climate change and global environmental shifts, with invasive alien plant species being a significant concern. Some of these invasive species have already become established, while others are in the process of naturalisation. Although forests are a relatively stable ecosystem, extreme weather events increase their vulnerability to change, and clearings left after natural disturbances are particularly susceptible to invasion by alien plant species (IAPS)...

Grassland covers approximately 17.4% of Europe's land area, stores about 20% of the world's soil carbon and has the potential to sequester carbon. With the help of sustainable management systems, grasslands could reduce greenhouse gases and act as a terrestrial sink for atmospheric CO2 . In this study, we will investigate the effect of grassland management (cutting, grazing, and a combination of the two) and soil depth (0-10, 10-20, 20-30 cm) on the physical (volumetric water content-VWC, bulk density-BD, porosity-POR, mass consisting of coarse fragments-FC) and chemical properties of soil (organic carbon-SOC, inorganic carbon-SIC, total carbon-STC, total nitrogen-STN, organic matter-SOM, C/N ratio, pH) in Central European lowlands...

The recent surge in dam construction has sparked debates regarding their contribution to carbon neutrality and food security, focusing on trade-offs between production benefits and ecological drawbacks. However, how dams affect carbon emissions and land cover changes, including their spatial differentiations, remains unclear. We quantified spatiotemporal variations in carbon emissions and storage of 137 large dams in China from 1992 to 2020, resulting from land cover change in potentially affected areas. We observed a lesser increase in carbon emissions and a more pronounced increase in carbon storage driven by forest conservation and regeneration within dam-affected areas compared to unaffected areas...

This study investigated the germination capacity (endogenous factor) of Petagnaea gussonei (Spreng.) Rauschert, an endemic monospecific plant considered as a relict species of the ancient Mediterranean Tertiary flora. This investigation focused also on the temporal trends of soil-use, climate and desertification (exogenous factors) across the natural range of P. gussonei. The final germination percentage showed low values between 14 and 32%, the latter obtained with GA3 and agar at 10 °C. The rising temperatures in the study area will further increase the dormancy of P...

European grasslands are among the most species-rich ecosystems on small spatial scales. However, human-induced activities like land use and climate change pose significant threats to this diversity. To explore how climate and land cover change will affect biodiversity and community composition in grassland ecosystems, we conducted joint species distribution models (SDMs) on the extensive vegetation-plot database sPlotOpen to project distributions of 1178 grassland species across Europe under current conditions and three future scenarios...

This study provides insights into factors that influence the water balance of selected European lakes, mainly in Central Europe, and their implications for water quality. An analysis of isotopic, chemical and land use data using statistical and artificial intelligence models showed that climate, particularly air temperature and precipitation, played a key role in intensifying evaporation losses from the lakes. Water balance was also affected by catchment factors, notably groundwater table depth. The study shows that lakes at lower altitudes with shallow depths and catchments dominated by urban or crop cover were more sensitive to water balance changes...

The aim of this study was to create a dataset of building locations in Poland from the 1970s-1980s. The source information was the historical 1:10 000 Polish topographic map. Building footprints were detected and extracted from approximately 8,500 scanned map sheets using the Mask R-CNN model implemented in Esri ArcGIS Pro software, and converted to point building locations. The dataset of building locations covers the entire country and contains approximately 11 million points representing buildings. The accuracy of the dataset was assessed manually on randomly selected map sheets...

Despite repeated spillover transmission and their potential to cause significant morbidity and mortality in human hosts, the New World mammarenaviruses remain largely understudied. These viruses are endemic to South America, with animal reservoir hosts covering large geographic areas and whose transmission ecology and spillover potential are driven in part by land use change and agriculture that put humans in regular contact with zoonotic hosts.We compiled published studies about Guanarito virus, Junin virus, Machupo virus, Chapare virus, Sabia virus, and Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis virus to review the state of knowledge about the viral hemorrhagic fevers caused by New World mammarenaviruses...

Many large carnivores, despite widespread habitat alteration, are rebounding in parts of their former ranges after decades of persecution and exploitation. Cougars ( Puma concolor ) are apex predator with their remaining northern core range constricted to mountain landscapes and areas of western North America; however, cougar populations have recently started rebounding in several locations across North America, including northward in boreal forest landscapes. A camera-trap survey of multiple landscapes across Alberta, Canada, delineated a range edge; within this region, we deployed an array of 47 camera traps in a random stratified design across a landscape spanning a gradient of anthropogenic development relative to the predicted expansion front...

Water availability in the subhumid region is highly vulnerable to frequent droughts. Water scarcity in this region has become a limiting factor for ecosystem health, human livelihood, and regional economic development. A notable pattern of land cover change in the subhumid region of the United States is the increasing forest area due to afforestation/reforestation and woody plant encroachment (WPE). Given the distinct hydrological processes and runoff generation between forests and grasslands, it is important to evaluate the impacts of forest expansion on water resources, especially under future climate conditions...

Rapid urbanisation has led to significant environmental and climatic changes worldwide, especially in urban heat islands where increased land surface temperature (LST) poses a major challenge to sustainable urban living. In the city of Abha in southwestern Saudi Arabia, a region experiencing rapid urban growth, the impact of such expansion on LST and the resulting microclimatic changes are still poorly understood. This study aims to explore the dynamics of urban sprawl and its direct impact on LST to provide important insights for urban planning and climate change mitigation strategies...