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The response of land surface phenology (LSP) to the urban heat island effect (UHI) is a useful biological indicator for understanding how vegetated ecosystems will be affected by future climate warming. However, vegetation cover in rural areas is often dominated by cultivated land, whose phenological timing is considerably influenced by...

Illumination variations in non-atmospherically corrected high-resolution satellite (HRS) images acquired at different dates/times/locations pose a major challenge for large-area environmental mapping and monitoring. This problem is exacerbated in cases where a classification model is trained only on one image (and often limited training data) but...

Lichen is an important food source for caribou in Canada. Lichen mapping using remote sensing (RS) images could be a challenging task, however, as lichens generally appear in unevenly distributed, small patches, and could resemble surficial features. Moreover, collecting lichen labeled data (reference data) is expensive, which restricts the...

Droughts and floods are some of the major climatic hazards in the semi-arid areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Climate change affects the periodicity and severity of such hazards, and eventually the well-being of many rural communities in the region, including semi-arid Ghana. Enhancing the resilience of local communities to droughts and floods...

Operational monitoring of vegetation and its response to climate change involves the use of vegetation indices (VIs) in relation to relevant climatic data. This study analyses the temporal variations of vegetation indices in response to climatic data (temperature and precipitation) to better understand the phenological changes in the Wa -West and...

With the advent of high-spatial resolution (HSR) satellite imagery, urban land use/land cover (LULC) mapping has become one of the most popular applications in remote sensing. Due to the importance of context information (e.g., size/shape/texture) for classifying urban LULC features, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) techniques are...

To classify Very-High-Resolution (VHR) imagery, Geographic Object Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) is the most popular method used to produce high quality Land-Use/Land-Cover maps. A crucial step in GEOBIA is the appropriate parametrization of the segmentation algorithm prior to the classification. However, little effort has been made to automatically...

日本の「レンジャー」が体験したアメリカの国立公園での長期滞在ボランティア。それは、それまでの“アメリカの国立公園”観を覆す衝撃的な体験だった。国立公園到着の翌日から始まった体当たりのフィールドワーク、２度のアメリカ横断。２つの国立公園での長期研修と首都ワシントンでの内務省魚類野生生物局での実務研修を通じてようやく理解できたアメリカの自然保護政策とは！？　ボランティアの活用、モニタリング調査、イメージ戦略など、国立公園を訪れただけではわからない舞台裏を、日米の国立公園と国立野生生物保護区の比較しながら描き出す。国立公園ボランティアへの応募や国立公園での生活の様子などもまじえながら、アメリカの国立公園でのボランティアの役割や活躍の様子なども紹介。なお...

Here are some takeaway messages from our work on climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) synergies of interventions. 1. There is an overwhelming agreement on and evidence for CCA and DRR synergies of DRR and CCA interventions respectively. CCA synergies were high when skill development and livelihood development activities...

A new method was developed for mapping forest, agricultural, and urban land cover using remote sensing imagery. It is designed to better detect small land cover objects (e.g. small forest or agricultural patches) and monitor their change (e.g. fine-scale deforestation) using freely-available satellite imagery.