Tom 13 (2020): Zeszyt 3 (December 2020)

The spatio-temporal monitoring and understanding of the pattern of land-use and land-cover (LULC) change in the Himalayas are essential for sustainable development, especially from environmental planning and management perspective. The increasing anthropogenic activities and climate change in the Siwalik and Lesser Himalayas have substantially experienced rapid change in the natural landscape; however, detailed investigation and documentation of such observed changes are limited. This study aims to assess the LULC changes along the Kalsi-Chakrata road corridor located in the Lesser Himalayan region of Uttarakhand state of India using remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) for the periods 2000-2010 and 2010-2019. The LULC maps were generated from multi-temporal satellite images of the Landsat -7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM⁺) series for 2000 and 2010, and the Linear Imaging Self-Scanning System IV (LISS IV) images from Resourcesat-1 for 2019. The extent of spatial landscape changes occurred in different LULC classes was performed through the cross-tabulation change matrix in the GIS module up to the individual village level. The results indicate that the forest cover of the area was intensively converted to open areas, sparse vegetation, and different land-use categories. These included agricultural land, built-up areas, and decreased from 47.27 % in 2000 to 36.66 % in 2019. During the same period, the open areas and agricultural areas were increased by 15.86 % and 4.49 %, respectively. Moreover, the built-up areas (both urban and rural settlements) were progressively increased from 0.33% in 2000 to 0.56 % in 2019. The conversion of forests and sparsely vegetative areas to agricultural land and rural settlements is closely associated with the increasing anthropogenic activities due to population growth, tourism, movement of heavy vehicles for mining and other economic activities. The changes in land-cover to land use classes are more prominent in Samalta Dadauli, Nithala, Bhugtari, and Udapalta villages located between Kalsi and Sahiya town. The reported maximum transition of forest areas into the open area, agricultural land, and sparse vegetation indicates the possible scarcity of water, which could link with the incidence of climatic or seasonal variation in the Lesser Himalayan terrain to the hydro-geomorphic and anthropogenic processes. The trend in LULC change at the village level gave the insight to help to prioritize future mitigation planning and sustainable development that are exceedingly convenient for the planners, policymakers, and local authorities for comprehensive forest management, biodiversity strategies, and necessary conservation

The interest in the experience of legislative solutions to problems connected with the design and development of legal institutions in environmental protection in foreign countries, at first glance, is not directly related to the study of the laws of functioning and development of this legal institution. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that such an interest appears as rather justified and even logical, if one is to proceed, firstly, from general ideas about the development of land legislation in the context of globalisation, and secondly, if one is to consider the desire of countries to more widely implement global and European standards of environmental policies and rights and approaches to environmental protection in general. The purpose of this article is determined by the identification the main problems of land protection legislation in the field of and form on their basis the effective system of environmental regulation, combining administrative and legislative instruments with economic, regulatory and market mechanisms. Analysis of international legal acts is used as the leading research method. It was determined that the positive experience in foreign countries related to the legal regulation of relations in legal protection of the environment allows transferring the theoretical ideas about the legal structures existing in other countries to the practical plane, which, in turn, allow to optimally regulate the appropriate circle of public relations, taking into consideration the relevant historical traditions, the internal structure of national legislation, the features of the development of environmental legislation of the respective country. The concept of protecting land from pollution by hazardous substances and ways of improving and adapting legislation in the field of waste management were proposed. The practical significance of the study is determined by the need to integrate the land legislation industry into national environmental legislation.

There is no formal definition of feature identification but it depends on the application and context of the problem. This feature acts as primary elements for execution of several algorithms, hence feature identification is one of the significant steps for has been very interesting for several research groups. Various researchers have attempted in this regard for feature identification. The current work presents an approach for urban feature identification from satellite datasets for a detailed analysis of the features for better management of the resources. Several features based feature extraction approach has been attempted to identify the compare with statistical profiling. Microwave remote sensing is one of the significant methods of remote sensing to get the data where our optical sensors usually failed or less capable to provide accurate and timely sensed data. In today’s world, active remote sensing is one of the greatest technologies which is used widely in many application areas. Synthetic aperture radar is the main object to get the actively remote sensed images. Either it’s optical or microwave data, the satellite images has its many errors, in SAR, while receiving the reflected echoes from the target the trouble has occurred in the form of Speckle Noise in an image. In this paper, the focus is on about the Speckle Noise, SLC & GRD data, the filtered images performance with Boxcar and Median filter, degraded and preserving information of an image, reduce speckle noise effect of an image.

Oil palms are an important crop for Malaysia as the main crop cultivated from agricultural lands for economic purposes. The livelihood of small growers is, in fact, very dependent on that industry. The present study employs the application of remote sensing of higher resolution to assess the biophysical characteristics of oil palms stands for a plantation in Lenggeng, Negeri Sembilan, Malay Peninsula. Band combination with the use of natural, red, blue bands and red-edge spectrum was employed to obtain early information on the oil palm stands at the site. We subsequently employed fish eye camera to collect information on leaf area index at the field. The study also measured the height and diameter at breast height of all plots established in the site. Finally, correlation was performed to establish the relationships between height-to-leaf area index relations. Diameter at breast height measuring points was scattered at the upper part of the line that formed negative relationships (R² = -0.0313). Height was positively associated with leaf area index, a bit weaker (R² = 0.2323). Interpolation found plots at varying elevation level. Maximum height of the trees was recorded at the highest elevation in the site, presumably due to the higher solar radiation that enhances photosynthesis. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of the finding for implementation elsewhere in assessing the biophysical characteristics of oil palm trees. The study leads to further understanding of oil palms, specifically the biophysical characteristics associated with plant productivity assessment.

Combined effect of environmental change and management variability leads to reduced soil diversity in homogenous forest stands. On the other hand, forest soil diversity is maintained with rich tree species composition. In this study, focus has been put on deriving urgency to change forest tree species composition in order to increase soil diversity in biogeographic regions with uneven impact of environmental change. The relation of forest tree species and soil diversities was compared between the periods of dominant sulphur deposition (1985–1994) and the period of regional environmental change (2003–2012) in the Czech Republic (Central Europe; 78 866 km²; 115–1602 m n.m.). Forest tree species and soil diversities were assessed using linear regression, discrimination analysis and geographically weighted regression including residue analysis. The effect of spatial differences of acid deposition on soil properties, though, decreased, still dependencies between the diversity of bedrock, soils and forest tree species increased significantly. Only 12.9 % of forests in the territory of the CR have optimum tree species diversity. The total of 65.9 % of forest require highly or moderately urgent transformation. An increase in spatial dependencies between soil and tree species diversities confirms the importance of site differentiation in forest transformation.

This study deals with the analysis of changes in the secondary landscape structure of the territory of the Jeseniky Mountains (Czech Republic) monitored in the years 1946, 1953, 1962, 2000, and 2016. The study analysed georeferencing aerial geodetic images in the QGIS 2.18 program. On the basis of the land use classification key that was created, historical changes were identified in the following categories of land use; forest, arable land, orchards, water surfaces, wild life refuges and scattered greenery, river networks, permanent grass stands, meadows and pastures, gardens and built-up areas, courtyards and hard surfaces. The surface areas of land use categories were utilized for the calculation of change indicators regarding the structure of the landscape (landscape similarity index, coefficient of ecological stability, and change index). The maps for land use created for individual historical periods functioned as the starting point for a comprehensive assessment of the landscape by means of a SWOT analysis, which created the basis for a proposal for permanently sustainable utilization of the landscape in the area that was monitored. The study results indicate that the analysis of the historical development of the secondary landscape structure may be utilized as a decision support tool when planning sustainable landscape management.

This paper focuses on the ecosystem services which are provided by agriculture land and on the urban sprawl in the study area of municipality with extended powers Třebíč. The main focus of this article is to evaluate what ecosystem services are provided to Czech society by the agricultural land and assess their financial value and also evaluate which ecosystem services disappear or are limited due to urban sprawl on agricultural land. Generally, the topic of ecosystem services in agriculture comes under focus especially in view of the recurring drought in Europe and on-going climate change. Also the subject of urbanization and decreasing area available for agriculture is a wide-spread phenomena in Europe. The practical output of this paper will comprise of better insight on function and value of land under agriculture use which is lost due to urban development and raising the awareness amongst the society on the fast-growing trend of unsustainable urban sprawl.

This pilot case study compares genome sizes of two groups of species (conspecific plants) which spontaneously colonize interior space within abandoned industrial area and/or deposits, and those ones occurred in adjacent vicinity. Testing of the hypothesis “There is functional significance of small versus large genomes of plant species by comparing their occurrence in unreclaimed toxic deposits as an example of stressed environment and in their populations from neighbouring habitats” confirmed this idea.