Search

Urbanization often incurs environmental costs, as fertile agricultural and forested lands are converted into urban areas. Herat City is currently undergoing significant urban transformation. This research aims to assess the impact of urban sprawl on Herat City's urban ecological status during 2000, 2013, and 2021, using GIS and remote sensing. The urban expansion intensity index was used to measure urban sprawl. The Mean Remote Sensing Ecological Index (MRSEI), integrating known granulation entropy (KGE) and comprehensive distance-based ranking (COBRA) algorithms, was utilized to evaluate urban ecological status. The random forest (RF) supervised machine learning-based algorithm was used to classify the study area into four categories (Built-up, Bare-land, Water, and Vegetation). Findings indicate rapid development from 2000 to 2013, followed by moderate expansion until 2021. Urban ecological quality degradation is observed in various directions over time, with the southeast consistently demonstrating excellent status. Interestingly, while good and excellent urban ecological status decreases over two decades, poor and very poor conditions improve. The research underscores an inverse relationship between urban expansion intensity and ecological status, highlighting the need for improved strategies to mitigate environmental decline. These findings will inform Afghan governmental bodies and international organizations, enabling them to better address resource consumption, ecological disruptions, social inequalities, and foster sustainable development., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethical approval: All authors have read, understood, and have complied as applicable with the statement on “Ethical responsibilities of Authors” as found in the Instructions for Authors. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

Various natural hazards such as landslides, avalanches, floods and debris flows can result in enormous property damages and human casualties in Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Mountainous topographic character and high frequency of heavy rain are the main factors for landslide occurrence in Ardesen, Rize. For this reason, the main target of the present study is to evaluate the landslide hazards using a sequence of historical aerial photographs in Ardesen (Rize), Turkey, by Photogrammetry and Geographical Information System (GIS). Landslide locations in the study area were identified by interpretation of aerial photographs dated in 1973 and 2002, and by field surveys. In the study, the selected factors conditioning landslides are lithology, slope gradient, slope aspect, vegetation cover, land class, climate, rainfall and proximity to roads. These factors were considered as effective on the occurrence of landslides. The areas under landslide threat were analyzed and mapped considering the landslide conditioning factors. Some of the conditioning factors were investigated and estimated by employing visual interpretation of aerial photos and topographic data. The results showed that the slope, lithology, terrain roughness, proximity to roads, and the cover type played important roles on landslide occurrence. The results also showed that degree of landslides was affected by the number of houses constructed in the region. As a consequence, the method employed in the study provides important benefits for landslide hazard mitigation efforts, because a combination of both photogrammetric techniques and GIS is presented.

Coastline mapping and coastline change detection are critical issues for safe navigation, coastal resource management, coastal environmental protection, and sustainable coastal development and planning. Changes in the shape of coastline may fundamentally affect the environment of the coastal zone. This may be caused by natural processes and/or human activities. Over the past 30 years, the coastal sites in Turkey have been under an intensive restraint associated with a population press due to the internal and external touristic demand. In addition, urbanization on the filled up areas, settlements, and the highways constructed to overcome the traffic problems and the other applications in the coastal region clearly confirm an intensive restraint. Aerial photos with medium spatial resolution and high resolution satellite imagery are ideal data sources for mapping coastal land use and monitoring their changes for a large area. This study introduces an efficient method to monitor coastline and coastal land use changes using time series aerial photos (1973 and 2002) and satellite imagery (2005) covering the same geographical area. Results show the effectiveness of the use of digital photogrammetry and remote sensing data on monitoring large area of coastal land use status. This study also showed that over 161 ha areas were filled up in the research area and along the coastal land 12.2 ha of coastal erosion is determined for the period of 1973 to 2005. Consequently, monitoring of coastal land use is thus necessary for coastal area planning in order to protecting the coastal areas from climate changes and other coastal processes.