Abstract: Climate change is a global phenomena that carries strong and sensitive effects at local scales, especially in cities, where more than 50% of world population is nowadays settled (Harlan and Ruddel, 2011). Urbanization is featured by intensive building, specifically by edification density and shape (Emmanuel, 2005, Hasenack, 1989), as well as by high rates of vehicles circulation in cities (Gu et al., 2011), two dynamic systems whose combination can contribute for temperatures increasing in crowded areas, as registered by Bentley (2007), Kim and Kim (2011) and several other authors. We studied the situation of Porto Alegre, placed in the Southern Brazilian State, at 30°2'0" South and 51°12'0" West coordinates, regarding these three aspects. Analysing side by side statistical data of real estate local institution (SINDUSCON) on building indexes, vehicles fleet and temperatures variation, given respectively by State Traffic Authority (DETRAN) and the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET), it was possible to identify expressive rising in these variables along the last decade. Building data were available for the 12 past years. They have shown an increase of 52,72% from 1998 to 2008 taking in account the number of new edifications in the city. Data from 2009 and 2010 for building were overlooked as atypical because of the impact suffered from financial global crisis. Vehicle fleet has experimented an increase of 54,37% with respect to the number of circulating unities from 2000 to 2010. Annual average temperatures grew 0,3ºC – from 19,5ºC between 1990 and 1999 to 19,8ºC between 2000 and 2009. In order to face constraints related to missing data, and to understand the changing patterns of land occupation in the last decade, we compared satellite images captured by Landsat in 2000 and 2010. Using geoprocessing techniques, we identified patterns of expansion in built area of the whole city, markedly to South direction. Considering that the population of Porto Alegre is keeping an average growth rate of 6% from decade to decade since 1990, reaching to 1,4 million of indwellers in 2010, according the Sate Economic and Statistical Foundation (FEE/RS), we can take population growth as not so relevant as the increase observed in building and vehicles fleet. Although any strong conclusion cannot be stated from this analysis regarding temperatures rising determinants, we suggest that building and fleet vehicles variation deserve more attention in terms of monitoring by local authorities responsible for urban planning in order to avoid losses for quality of life in the city.

Abstract: Since 1992, European Member States are legally committed to monitor the biodiversity in designated areas of community interest. This was the success of the European Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC; HabDir) which established a network of these NATURA 2000 sites where trends in area and the quality of the protected habitats have to be observed. To fulfill the Directive's reporting requirements, Earth observation (EO) techniques are regarded as crucial to effectively map and monitor habitat status and change dynamics. The derived information supports public authorities in implementing management strategies The shift from focusing on single species to protecting entire habitats is a step towards sustaining the natural environment sensu nature conservation in several aspects: (1) habitats have a large umbrella function providing living space to whole ecosystems and (2) habitat protection is area-effective meaning that habitats have critical spatial parameters of their integrity (such as connectivity etc.), which can be assessed mapped and managed. That results in a significant share of a country's territory is under direct concern. The potential of new concepts and methods combing EO data and in-situ measurements is currently investigated in the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) project MS.MONINA (www.ms-monina.eu) which aims at offering EO-based services to authorities on European, national and local level. The multiscale approach followed by the project reflects both the specific information requirements on different (political) implementation levels of the Directive and the ecological levels addressed, i.e. the level of single habitats, over habitat arrangements on site and range level, up to biogeographical regions. Local management of NATURA 2000 sites is required to regularly report on the conservation status including information on habitat range, area, quality, impacts and threats. Monitoring the changes also includes judging whether site conditions would improve or deteriorate. The latter triggers explicit management strategies in order to safeguard a favorable conservation status. Dependent on the occurring habitat types and pressures, specific information products are required from high-resolution satellite imagery. Such services shall be provided in a high operational level so to deliver the required information steadily and sound, but also user-focused. Several pilot sites all over Europe have been chosen in MS.MONINA to elaborate information products for different habitat types and user requirements. Heathlands, grasslands, estuaries, floodplains and riverine forests, as well as alpine meadows are among the habitats to be addressed. The anthropogenic impacts include farming, settlement land use, land abandonment and tourism. On the level of federal states or countries tools will be provided to monitor precious ecosystems outside the NATURA 2000 network of protected areas. On either level, services based on dedicated EO-based data helps foster a sustainable maintenance of precious ecosystems and reduce the loss of biodiversity.

Abstract: This article presents a multiscale approach for detecting and monitoring soil erosion phenomena (i.e. gully erosion) in the agro-industrial area around the city of Taroudannt, Souss basin, Morocco. The study area is characterized as semi-arid with an annual average precipitation of 200 mm. Water scarcity, high population dynamics and changing land use towards huge areas of irrigation farming present numerous threats to sustainability. The agro-industry produces citrus fruit and vegetables in monocropping, mainly for the European market. Badland areas strongly affected by gully erosion border the agricultural areas as well as residential areas. To counteract the significant loss of land, land-levelling measures are attempted to create space for plantations and greenhouses. In order to develop sustainable approaches to limit gully growth the detection and monitoring of gully systems is fundamental. Specific gully sites are monitored with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) taking small-format aerial photographs (SFAP). This enables extremely high-resolution analysis (SFAP resolution: 2-10 cm) of the actual size of the gully channels as well as a detailed continued surveillance of their growth. Transferring the methodology on a larger scale using Quickbird satellite data (resolution: 60 cm) leads to the possibility of a large-scale analysis of the whole area around the city of Taroudannt (Area extent: ca. 350 km²). The results will then reveal possible relationships of gully growth and agro-industrial management and may even illustrate further interdependencies. The main objective is the identification of areas with high gully erosion risk due to non-sustainable land use and the development of mitigation strategies for the study area.

Abstract: The Sundarbans is the largest single block of tidal halophytic mangrove forest in the World. The versatile biodiversity of this forest, situated at the southwest of Bangladesh, plays a vital role in maintaining environmental sustainability of the country. This study identifies and quantifies the damage caused by the tropical cyclone Sidr in 15 November 2007 and the post-cyclone regeneration of the botanic biodiversity of the Sundarbans. Unsupervised classification and the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) were carried out over a temporal series of four Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM +) images for the month of February in the period between years 2007 and 2010. The obtained overall accuracies for the classification of the images of years 2007 and 2010 (the ones' for which there were ground-truth data available) were, respectively, 76% and 88%. Classification results and land change analysis show that three important botanic species - Heritiera fomes (Sundari), Excoecaria agallocha (Gewa) and Sonneratia mangrove (Kewra) have been significantly affected by the cyclone. On the other hand NDVI analysis indicated that 45% area of the Sundarbans (approximately 2500 sq.km) has been damaged due to the cyclone action. Results further indicate that the rate of post-cyclone regeneration in 2009-2010 is four times higher than the regeneration rate of 2008-2009. Although cyclone Sidr has done significant damage to the diversity of the mangrove forest, it has regenerated to a satisfactory condition despite the effects of climate change and man-made encroachment.

Abstract: Mitigation of global carbon emissions to prevent global warming potential using biofuels is highly dependent on direct and indirect land use change (LUC). There are still several uncertainties about how to assess the indirect LUC impacts of biofuels. However, direct LUC (dLUC) can be evaluated using remote sensing (RS). The present work has the aim to quantify the dLUC occurred during the recent sugarcane expansion for ethanol and sugar production concentrated in the South-Central region of Brazil. This region has a favorable climate for sugarcane production and also a great potential for agriculture expansion. Yearly monitoring from 2005 to 2010 using Landsat type imagery has shown that the sugarcane crop expanded during this period over 3.5 Mha in the South-Central region. To evaluate the dLUC in response to the expanded sugarcane area we used RS time series from the MODIS sensor transformed to the two-band enhanced vegetation index (EVI2), acquired from 2000 to 2009. The original sugarcane map was re-sampled to a pixel size of 250 x 250 m to be compatible with spatial resolution of the MODIS images. One percent of these pixels were systematically sampled covering 1035 pixels. Each of these pixels were carefully analyzed using a special developed web tool to visualize the entire MODIS time series overlaid with several Landsat-5 TM images acquired at key periods in order to correctly identify the land use/land cover prior to the sugarcane crop. Considering 2000 as reference year for the dLUC evaluation it was observed that: 69.8% of the sugarcane expanded on pasture land; 26.2% expanded on annual crops; 0.6% expanded on native vegetation; and 3.4 % was not sugarcane expansion but sugarcane renovation using crop rotation. It was interesting to notice that 35% of the pasture land in 2000 converted to sugarcane was first converted to annual crops. This practice is commonly adopted for one to two years on degraded pasture to improve the physical soil characteristics before introducing the sugarcane crop. It was also observed that the 0.6 % of native vegetation changed to sugarcane was previously converted to either annual crop (33%) or pasture land (67%). Although the analysis needs to be further refined the results clearly show that the dLUC observed during the recent sugarcane expansion for ethanol and sugar production in the South-Central region of Brazil is mainly occurring on pasture and agricultural land.

Abstract: The main purpose of this work was the development of a tool to detect in real time (daily) deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, using satellite images from the MODIS/TERRA sensor and Artificial Neural Networks. The developed tool provides the parameterization of the configuration for the neural network training to enable finding the best neural architecture to address the problem and makes use of confusion matrixes to determine the degree of success of the network. Part of the city of Porto Velho, in Rondônia state, makes up the tile H11V 09 of the MODIS/TERRA sensor, which was used as the study area. A spectrum-temporal analysis of this area was made on 57 images from 20 of May to 15 of July 2003 using the trained neural network. This analysis allowed verifying the quality of the implemented neural network classification as well as helped the understanding of the dynamics of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The great potential of neural networks for image classification was perceived with this work. However, the generation of consistent alarms, in other words, detecting predatory actions at the beginning; instead of firing false alarms is a complex task that is not yet solved. Therefore, the major contribution of this paper is to provide a theoretical basis and practical use of neural networks and satellite images to combat illegal deforestation.

Abstract: In sustainable agriculture it is getting more important the need of reducing environmental burden duo to agrochemical use. To carry out environmental protection, the responsible use of natural resources and keep rural development for the future generation is our taskThe term "sustainable development" includes the current and long-run sustainable production and the controversies of environmental protection that assurance the right quality of life, and hard-preventable, but rather tolerated conflicts. Sustainability must include the farming that allow for easy reproduction the assets needed for production not only business management level, but also on a national level management irrespectively of the source of capital necessary for farming. It is also important to maintenance of rural areas. Precision farming is one of the farming strategies in crop production which can increase farmer's efficiency and can reduce the chemical use – especially in plant protection – and also the burden of environment. Here in this research we have examined the economic relations between potential savings in chemicals on EU level and in Hungary by analyzing scenarios for implementing the site-specific technology in weed management. It has been found that after switching to precision farming, the active ingredient savings in herbicide use can be 30 thousand tons (calculating with the current dose-level) in EU-27. If approximately 30% of the crop producing and mixed farms over 16 ESU adopt this new technology, this will diminish environmental loads by up to 10-35%. In Hungary the expected area on which precision plant protection can be used is about 400 000 ha if 25 % of the farms operating over 16 ESU apply the technology. That means 229-587 to pesticide savings per year depending on the savings in dose of pesticide per hectare (that were: 25-30-50%), assuming the nowadays pesticide usage. The majority of farms characterized by greater output and size can be based on their own equipment but it might as well be presumed that smaller farms can turn to precision farming not based on their own investment, buying the technical service, establishing machinery rings. At a certain farm size and farming intensity precision crop production is a real, environmentally friendly farming strategy, with the help of which the farm can reach earnings that cover at least the economic conditions of simple reproduction.