Remote Sensing Based Analysis Of Land Cover And Land Cover Change In Central Sulawesi Indonesia

Tropical rain forests are the most complex, varied, and species-rich terrestrial ecosystems on earth. However, these unique forests are more and more threatened by human activities. About half of the originally forested area has been deforested in the past decades and the pressure on today’s remaining rain forests is still growing.The German-Indonesian research project STORMA (“Stability of Rainforest Margins in Indonesia”) analyses the causes, circumstances, and consequences of rain forest conversion. In its survey area in Central Sulawesi (Indonesia), vast areas of intact rain forest still exist but are currently facing increasing exploitation by the rural population. Especially the expansion of cultivation area for cocoa and maize represents a major threat for local rain forests.Remote sensing plays an important role in the examination of rain forest loss, because it allows the regionalisation and quantification of spatial developments at different scales. In his book, Christian Knieper gains information about land cover and land cover change in Central Sulawesi on the basis of a Landsat 7/ETM+ time series. He applies a modern object-oriented approach which allows the analysis of non-spectral features (e.g. shape, spatial relations, thematic data) and goes beyond the pure isolated statistical examination of each pixel’s spectral values offered by traditional remote sensing techniques. The gathered results on land cover change provide essential information for socio-economic as well as ecological research activities within STORMA.

Filling the need for a comprehensive book that covers both theory and application, Remote Sensing of Land Use and Land Cover: Principles and Applications provides a synopsis of how remote sensing can be used for land-cover characterization, mapping, and monitoring from the local to the global scale. With contributions by leading scientists from aro

The natural environment of drylands is highly vulnerable and fra¬gile, variations of climate conditions here are the highest among all terrestrial ecosystems and that is why they are expected to be strongly influenced by the current climate change. Remote sensing and GIS play an important role in a better understanding about the nature of climate impacts on the drylands as a whole system and on the vegetation cover as the most important component of this ecosystem at all scales from global to regional and local. This book is one of the first to examine the dynamics of drylands in Kazakhstan using time series of remote sensing derived data and climate records over the last 20 years. The author investigated the problem from different views and combined analyses at multiple time and spatial scales. The entire spectrum of the interrelationship between climate and vegetation cover - spatial and temporal, on the regional, subregional and local scale, interannual and within the growing season -, has been analysed, described and discussed. A new monitoring approach was presented which enables discrimination between climatic and anthropogenic forces in the complex of dryland dynamics. The text improves the understanding of the nature and mechanisms of the ecosystem dynamics in the internal Eurasia and provides the basis for predicting changes in vegetation productivity that accompany changes in climate and human activities. Taken as a whole, the results of this study present indispensable information for ecological and socio-economic research and may be used by scientists, landscape managers, and decision makers interested in this region.

Nowadays, land cover changes are a major issue of global environmental change. Investigation on this subject has now been done by using remote sensing application. Research has been done in the Penang Island, which is one of the affected areas due to industrial and residential areas growth. Thus, this monograph is published to demonstrate an effective application through remote sensing technique to explore the environmental change and its impact on local environment that is caused by abrupt change in land use. It provides appropriate and comprehensive information for researchers involved in the study of environmental management, urban planning, land surface characteristics, and related support fields. This monograph highlights the relationship between land surface temperature and normalized difference vegetation index as the major results. The remote sensing technique used in this study was found to be efficient. It reduced the time for the analysis of land cover changes and was found to be a useful tool. Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, but it is posing new challenges to humans and natural ecosystems in the 21st century. From climate change to increasingly mobile human populations to the global economy, the relationship between humans and their environment is being modified in ways that will have long-term impacts on ecological health, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, population vulnerability, and sustainability. These changes and challenges are perhaps nowhere more evident than in island ecosystems. Buffeted by rising ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, sea-level rise, climate change, tourism, population migration, invasive species, and resource limitations, islands represent both the greatest vulnerability to globalization and also the greatest scientific opportunity to study the significance of global changes on ecosystem processes, human-environment interactions, conservation, environmental policy, and island sustainability. In this book, we study islands through the lens of Land Cover/Land Use Change (LCLUC) and the multi-scale and multi-thematic drivers of change. In addition to assessing the key processes that shape and re-shape island ecosystems and their land cover/land use changes, the book highlights measurement and assessment methods to characterize patterns and trajectories of change and models to examine the social-ecological drivers of change on islands. For instance, chapters report on the results of a meta-analysis to examine trends in published literature on islands, a satellite image time-series to track changes in urbanization, social surveys to support household analyses, field sampling to represent the state of resources and their limitations on islands, and dynamic systems models to link socio-economic data to LCLUC patterns. The authors report on a diversity of islands, conditions, and circumstances that affect LCLUC patterns and processes, often informed through perspectives rooted, for instance, in conservation, demography, ecology, economics, geography, policy, and sociology.

Over the last decades, the rapid growth of the world population has led to a large number of emerging megacities. The 1999 Izmit (Turkey) earthquake is a striking example of the impact of natural hazards on megacities. On August 17, 1999, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the area of Izmit, Turkey, resulting in 18,000 fatalities and US$ 18 billion in economic losses. The probability of a magnitude 7 earthquake striking Istanbul within the next 30 years ranges between 30% to 70%. In order to reduce the impact of natural hazards on human lives, emergency management plans are essential. The development of these plans strongly relies on up-to-date population and inventory data. However, existing techniques for population data generation do not meet the requirements of today’s dynamic cities. In this context, remote sensing has become an important source of information in the last years. However, detailed analyses on the suitability of remote sensing for urban applications are still rare.For her study, Julia Kubanek conducted a quantitative evaluation of the suitability of Ikonos imagery (1m resolution) for population modeling in the district of Zeytinburnu (Istanbul, Turkey). The results show that Ikonos images can be used for complementing existing inventory data sets. The automated extraction of single buildings was identified as the major source of error in the estimation of the population. Kubanek's study discusses the replacement of traditional, time-consuming and cost-intensive techniques for population estimation with remotely sensed imagery as a relatively new data source in an increasingly urbanized and fast-changing world. Her book addresses scientists and professionals in geography, remote sensing, urban planning, and natural hazards research.

Die Cordillera Central der Dominikanischen Republik ist eine Quelle wichtiger natürlicher Ressourcen – vor allem Wasser – für dieses karibische Land. Im oberen Einzugsgebiet des Río Yaque del Norte wurde im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts ein großer Teil der natürlichen Wälder abgeholzt und durch Weide- und Ackerland sowie Sekundärvegetation ersetzt. Entwaldung und nicht nachhaltige Landnutzung auf den steilen Hängen dieses Gebietes haben zu Erosion und Landdegradierung geführt. Es gibt aber auch noch verschiedene primäre Bergwälder, darunter kleine Nebelwaldbereiche mit bedrohten endemischen Arten. Fernerkundungsdaten sind eine unverzichtbare Quelle für flächendeckende räumliche Informationen, die als Basis für Raumnutzungspläne und den Schutz bedrohter Ökosysteme benötigt werden. Die Nutzbarkeit von Satellitendaten mittlerer Auflösung (z.B. Landsat) für die Kartierung der Vegetationstypen des Untersuchungsgebietes ist begrenzt, weil das kleinräumige Mosaik verschiedener Landbedeckungstypen (wie in vielen tropischen Gebirgsbereichen) zu einem großen Anteil von Mischpixeln in diesen Daten führt. Die neue Generation kommerzieller hochauflösender Satelliten wie IKONOS (1 m bis 4 m Auflösung) ermöglicht eine detailliertere Kartierung von kleineren Interessensgebieten, aber die automatische Klassifizierung räumlich hochaufgelöster Daten beinhaltet auch neue Herausforderungen. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich daher hauptsächlich mit der Optimierung von Methoden zur Ausnutzung der räumlichen Information in hochauflösenden Satellitendaten für die Kartierung von tropischen Bergwäldern und anderen Landoberflächen.

This international symposium featured three interconnected thematic foci of interdisciplinary research. They focussed on the changes in the extent and intensity of agricultural and forest land use in tropical forest margins and their implications for rural development and for conservation of natural resources such as biodiversity, soils and water. The symposium took place in Goettingen. Almost 130 international authors have contributed a short abstract and their adress.