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Climate change and overpopulation have led to an increase in water demands worldwide. As a result, land subsidence due to groundwater extraction and water level decline is causing damage to communities in arid and semiarid regions. The agricultural plain of Samalghan in Iran has recently experienced wide areas of land subsidence, which is...

Soil moisture is a critical component for Earth science studies, and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data have high potential for retrieving soil moisture using backscattering models. In this study, polarimetric SAR (PALSAR: Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) data and polarimetric decompositions including span, entropy/H/alpha, and...

Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

In this study, we measured and characterized the relative dielectric constant of mineral soils over the 0.3–3.0 frequency range, and compared our measurements with values of three dielectric constant simulation models (the Wang, Dobson, and Mironov models). The interrelationship between land cover and soil texture with respect to the dielectric...

Generally, the characterization of land surface roughness is obtained from the analysis of height variations observed along transects (e.g., root mean square (RMS) height, correlation length, and autocorrelation function). These surface roughness measurements are then used as inputs for surface dynamics modeling, e.g., for soil erosion modeling...

This paper presents a collective sensing approach that integrates imperfect Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) obtained through Citizen Science (CS) tree mapping projects with very high resolution (VHR) optical remotely sensed data for low-cost, fine-scale, and accurate mapping of trees in urban orchards. To this end, an individual tree crown...

Recognising the importance of markets to sustainable forest management, this document provides guidance to timber buyers on the steps that they can take to responsibly purchase Papua New Guinean export timber. Log exports have been a major foreign exchange earner for PNG, but weak enforcement of forest laws means that the forest estate is mostly...

This report aims to contribute to the management of PNG’s forests as a renewable natural asset for the collective benefit of all Papua New Guineans. It argues that to achieve these ends, illegalities in the forest sector need serious attention. The report aims to (i) provide a review of the illegal logging issue in PNG, (ii) identify the potential...