Book chapter

Fire is a key component of many land use systems and a determinant of land change. There is a growing concern that climate change will cause more catastrophic fires, but in many areas the impacts will be mediated by human land use practices.

Forest cover monitoring plays an important role in the implementation of climate change mitigation policies such as Kyoto protocol and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

Polarimetry is a technique for quantitatively estimating the change in polarization in a backscattered electromagnetic signal (in this case a radar signal) with reference to the polarization of the incident signal for estimating the geophysical properties (roughness and dielectric constant) of su

Land cover classification using remotely sensed data requires robust classification methods for the accurate mapping of complex land cover area of different categories. In this regard, support vector machines (SVMs) have recently received increasing attention.