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#landuse — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #landuse, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Impact Of Urbanization Driven Land Use And Land Cover Change On Ecological Environmental Quality In Rupandehi Nepal Assessed Using The Remote Sensing Ecological Index
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    doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-006 <-- shared paper
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    kathmandupost.com/money/2026/0 <-- shared media article
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    H/T@ Gaurav Parajulim
    “[The authors] studied how the ecological quality of Nepal's Rupandehi District has changed over three decades (1993–2023), using satellite imagery and the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) to track the health of the landscape year by year and to understand how urbanization-driven land use change has reshaped it.
    What [they] found tells a nuanced story: as Butwal and Bhairahawa grew and built-up land expanded, ecological quality shifted in ways that a single number can't capture, some areas recovered, others declined, and the patterns rarely moved in a straight line…”
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    “Rapid urbanization and population growth are major drivers of land use and land cover (LULC) change and can substantially alter ecological environmental quality (EEQ). This study assessed the spatiotemporal dynamics of LULC and their effect on EEQ in Rupandehi District, Nepal, over a 30-year period (1993–2023). Four ecological indicators representing greenness, wetness, dryness, and heat were derived from Landsat imagery in Google Earth Engine (GEE), and LULC was classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) was then constructed from these indicators using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in ArcGIS Pro, and its spatial structure was examined using global and local spatial autocorrelation. The mean RSEI followed a non-linear trajectory, rising from 0.59 in 1993 to 0.635 in 2004, declining to 0.55 in 2013, and recovering to 0.67 in 2023, indicating an overall improvement in EEQ with a temporary mid-period decline. Over the same period, built-up areas expanded substantially and agricultural land declined, whereas forest cover fluctuated but showed a slight net increase by 2023, and barren land decreased markedly. Higher EEQ was concentrated in the forested northern hills, while lower values occurred in the urban centers of Butwal and Bhairahawa, closely matching the spatial pattern of LULC change. The results indicate that ecological quality reflects the combined influence of all land cover classes rather than any single class. This study provides a transferable and reproducible workflow for long-term ecological assessment based on openly available Landsat data, with the analysis code shared in a public repository, offering practical guidance for sustainable land management and environmentally responsible urban development...”
    #GIS #spatial #mapping #RemoteSensing #GIS #RSEI #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Nepal #Research #GoogleEarthEngine #ArcGIS #EcologicalQuality #spatialautocorrelation #ecology #environment #earthobservation #RemoteSensingEcologicalIndex #landscape #urbanisation #urban #development #landuse #change #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal

  2. #Mining sub-Saharan Africa is expanding rapidly. This poses a key threat to tropical forests.

    "For every hectare of direct deforestation due to the mine footprint, mining triggers, on average, 34 hectares of additional offsite loss within five years through ancillary activities, including agriculture and settlements. Mines extracting cobalt and copper—key energy transition minerals—caused the highest amount of additional deforestation."

    Morton et al. (2026). "Mining triggers extensive additional deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa" doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-105 🧩 🧵

    #extraction #landscape #pollution #cobalt #copper #gold #climateChange #rivers #deforestation #soil #carbon #causality #land #footprint #forests #landLoss #landUse #Africa #Congo #DRC #Centrafrique #Zambia #ZA #SouthAfrica

  3. Optical, Radar, And Hybrid Indices To Detect Farming Practices In Europe
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    doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2026.115 <-- shared paper
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    “HIGHLIGHTS:
    • [they] compare[d] Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series to detect farming practices.
    • HyBRIS index is introduced, temporally weighting BSI and VH/VV into a daily index.
    • Time-series minima and maxima are used to predict sowing, harvest, and tillage.
    • Validation is performed across several years, crop types, and European locations.
    • Phenology detection is improved compared to HRL-Cropland.
    ABSTRACT: Arable farming practices dictate both crop cycles and soil dynamics, and are central to agriculture's environmental impact and its mitigation. Sowing and harvesting mark the beginning and end of the growing season, while tillage modifies soil structure during the dormant period. Although well-established methods exist for delineating the growing season using phenology and optical data, the detection of farming practices, particularly tillage, remains underexplored. This study investigates the strengths of radar and optical data to retrieve sowing, harvest, and tillage dates at the field level, and proposes a novel Hybrid Bare Soil Radar Index (HyBRIS). Based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, HyBRIS merges optical and radar data into a single index using a temporally weighted mean. Local minima and maxima of the time series are used to detect farming practices across European sites. Validation is carried out against a reference dataset comprising 238 fields in 11 EU countries, including 462 sowing, 374 harvest, and 388 tillage events covering more than 40 crop types over 8 years. Compared to the Copernicus High Resolution Layer Croplands product (HRL-Cropland), the proposed method based on HyBRIS time series improved sowing and harvest dates detection (MAE 26 and 23 days, respectively). Additionally, this method enabled tillage dates estimation during dormant periods (MAE = 28 days), but tended to overestimate the number of tillage events (producer's accuracy = 97%, user's accuracy = 70%). Incorporating soil moisture data is advised for reducing false positives. The results highlight the potential of optical, radar, and hybrid indices for monitoring agricultural management and supporting environmental stewardship…”
    #Sowing #Harvest #tillage #tillagedetection #cropland #CroplandManagement #remotesensing #earthobservation #sentinel #Copernicus #cropland #satellite #optical #radar #sensor #landuse #landcover #landsurface #phenology #agricultural #monitoring #GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #arable #farming #agriculture #soil #substrate #environment #sustainability #environmentalstewardship #growingseason #Europe #region #model #modeling

  4. Painting the Growing Season in the Maize Triangle

    Along the Vetrivier (Vet River) in South Africa, a patchwork of circular and rectangular fields spreads across what…
    #NewsBeep #News #Space #Agriculture #EarthObservatory #JetPropulsionLaboratory #LandCover #LandUse #NISAR(NASA-ISROSyntheticApertureRadar) #Science #UK #UnitedKingdom
    newsbeep.com/uk/609986/

  5. A dispute over a #biogas plant ends up in court? 🔥⚖️ A case study by ZALF shows how a #conflict over land use in a village in Brandenburg escalated and provides tips on how to prevent such escalations. 👥🤝 💬
    zalf.de/en/aktuelles/Pages/PB2

    #conflictmanagement #landuse #conflict #energy #research

  6. Where do we go from here?

    Unlike the Cowichan River, the #Koksilah is an uncontrolled #river with no storage and as such, there are limited options available to manage flows. The only options available to us are to change our current practices around #LandUse and #WaterUse. Most importantly, the #KoksilahRiver is challenging all of us to work together to collaboratively identify and implement solutions that will impact us all. New collaborations and partnerships are emerging.

    An informal “Koksilah #DroughtManagement team” has been formed to discuss how to collaboratively make short term in-season decisions and work with water users to navigate periods of low flow. This ad-hoc group is comprised of representatives from #FLNRORD, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Cowichan Station’s Koksilah Working Group, BC Dairy Association, BC Agriculture Council, Cowichan Watershed Board, Farmland Advantage, Water Survey of Canada, Cowichan Estuary Nature Centre and private forestry representatives.

    In the longer term, an innovative government to government partnership has been struck between Cowichan Tribes and the FNLRORD to explore and scope the feasibility of initiating a joint #WaterSustainability Planning process, an innovative new tool under #BCWaterSustainabilityAct (2016).

    For more information about the potential of Water Sustainability Plans, see Curran, D. and O.M. Brandes. 2019 Water Sustainability Plans: Potential, Options and Essential Content (2019) by Deborah Curran and Oliver M. Brandes, University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre and the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance.

    poliswaterproject.org/polis-re

    "As one element in the modernized provincial water regime, Water Sustainability Plans are a promising tool that can enable and enhance adaptive water management and new governance relationships that express core elements of government-to-government relationships for water and watersheds, as well as address the challenges of environmental flows, sustainable groundwater management, drought planning and protecting and enhancing watershed health."

    Deborah Curran & Oliver M. Brandes
    Water Sustainability Plans: Potential, Options and Essential Content (2019)

    #BackroadAdventures #VancouverIsland #water #river #Shawnigan #DayAdventure #DayTrip #PacificNorthwest #ProtectWatersheds #nature #VanIsle #Cascadia #PNW #NaturesPower #WaterIsLife #ProtectWatersheds #ProtectNature #Hydro #RiversOfBC #RiversOfVancouverIsland #Indigenous #FirstNations #Historical #Cowichan #WaterFlow #RiverFlows #HydrologyManagement

  7. Proud to announce I will be hosting a session on #LandUseConflicts at this year's #EUGEO conference in Barcelona, together with my colleague Dr. Larissa Koch. 🥳

    The #CallForPapers is open until March 31st: eugeobcn23.eu/sessions/?id=120
    Would appreciate some sharing - looking forward to exciting contributions!

    @geography @politicalscience @sociology #conflict #landuse #ConflictManagement

  8. This one I started without really knowing where it was going, but I have been watching a lot of Issac Arthur YouTube videos, that often talk about the possibility of most people living off world.

    #art #comics #inkdrawing
    #reuse #landuse #crotonpointpark #littleisland #kingsbridge #earth