Evaluation of Land-Use Changes as a Result of Underground Coal Mining—A Case Study on the Upper Nitra Basin, West Slovakia

Mining activity has one of the most fundamental influences on the landscape (in terms of both aesthetics and use). Its activity and manifestations, even when mining takes place underground, have visual manifestations on the surface. The impact of subsurface mining has a synergistic effect on the elements of the landscape structure. This manifestation is continuous in the context of mining intensity. Using the Earth remote sensing method, we identified several fundamental changes. The most significant of these was the creation of wetlands and the modification of watercourse lines. In the area in which there was no permanent water sources, several water areas with a total area of more than 30 ha were created. We also found that the length of watercourses has halved, the area of grassland has doubled, and urban area has decreased. It was the creation of water areas that supported not only better ecological stability of the landscape, but also the growth of biodiversity. Wetlands can be a dynamic element of future development. Understanding the development of land-cover changes is necessary for the purpose of planning nature and landscape conservation, as well as to identify areas of conflict with economic use

Evaluation of Land-Use Changes as a Result of Underground Coal Mining—A Case Study on the Upper Nitra Basin, West Slovakia

Mining activity has one of the most fundamental influences on the landscape (in terms of both aesthetics and use). Its activity and manifestations, even when mining takes place underground, have visual manifestations on the surface. The impact of subsurface mining has a synergistic effect on the elements of the landscape structure. This manifestation is continuous in the context of mining intensity. Using the Earth remote sensing method, we identified several fundamental changes. The most significant of these was the creation of wetlands and the modification of watercourse lines. In the area in which there was no permanent water sources, several water areas with a total area of more than 30 ha were created. We also found that the length of watercourses has halved, the area of grassland has doubled, and urban area has decreased. It was the creation of water areas that supported not only better ecological stability of the landscape, but also the growth of biodiversity. Wetlands can be a dynamic element of future development. Understanding the development of land-cover changes is necessary for the purpose of planning nature and landscape conservation, as well as to identify areas of conflict with economic use

Towards Detection of Cutting in Hay Meadows by Using of NDVI and EVI Time Series

The main requirement for preserving European hay meadows in good condition is through prerequisite cut management. However, monitoring these practices on a larger scale is very difficult. Our study analyses the use of MODIS vegetation indices products, namely EVI and NDVI, to discriminate cut and uncut meadows in Slovakia. We tested the added value of simple transformations of raw data series (seasonal statistics, first difference series), compared EVI and NDVI, and analyzed optimal periods, the number of scenes and the effect of smoothing on classification performance. The first difference series transformation saw substantial improvement in classification results. The best case NDVI series classification yielded overall accuracy of 85% with balanced rates of producer’s and user’s accuracies for both classes. EVI yielded slightly lower values, though not significantly different, although user accuracy of cut meadows achieved only 67%. Optimal periods for discriminating cut and uncut meadows lay between 16 May and 4 August, meaning only seven consecutive images are enough to accurately detect cutting in hay meadows. More importantly, the 16-day compositing period seemed to be enough for detection of cutting, which would be the time span that might be hopefully achieved by upcoming on-board HR sensors (e.g., Sentinel-2)

Contribution of Traditional Farming to Ecosystem Services Provision: Case Studies from Slovakia

The main aim of this study is to assess the benefits provided by the ecosystems of traditional agricultural landscapes (TAL) and compare them to the outputs of large-scale agriculture. Assessment of ecosystem services (ES) was performed in four case-study areas situated in Slovakia, representing different types of TAL: Viticultural landscape, meadow–pasture landscape, and agricultural landscape with dispersed settlements and mosaics of orchards. The methodological approach was focused on assessment of all the principal types of ES—regulation and maintenance, provisioning, and cultural. Differences in the provision of ES due to the impact of different practices and intensities of agricultural landscape management were subsequently assessed and compared. The results show that TAL are generally more diverse and balanced regarding ES provision, mainly because of their varied patterns and their related functions. In particular they play an important role in water retention and the prevention of soil erosion—both important with respect to changes in climate. Modern intensive agriculture is principally able to fulfil the production functions. Support for traditional farming, landscape diversification and small-scale agricultural management is vital for enhancing the values of rural regions. Such measures could become key drivers for sustainable agricultural management in Slovakia, and elsewhere

Nineteenth-century land-use legacies affect contemporary land abandonment in the Carpathians

<p>DC from volunteer CVD4000#119 treated or not with ZVA-D or CCD agents were incubated with uninfected or <i>S.</i> Typhi-infected CD45-labeled blasts at a DC∶blast ratio of 1∶5 at 37°C. After 2 hours of incubation, DC were stained with ViViD, followed by surface staining with mAbs to HLA-DR, DC-Sign, <i>Salmonella</i> common structural antigens (CSA) and caspase-3 and analysed by flow cytometry. DC were gated based on their scatter characteristics. Single DC were selected by gating on forward scatter height vs. forward scatter area and then on HLA-DR and DC-Sign. (A) endocytosis and apoptosis on DC was analyzed by studying expression of CD45 and caspase-3, respectively. (B) Viability of DC under different culture conditions was evaluated by ViViD as a dead cell exclusion marker. Dotted lines represent the cut-offs between positive and negative cells. Numbers correspond to the percentage of positive cells in the indicated quadrants or regions in each histogram. These results are representative of 1 of 3 volunteers with similar results.</p

Assessing Non-Photosynthetic Cropland Biomass from Spaceborne Hyperspectral Imagery

Non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) biomass has been identified as a priority variable for upcoming spaceborne imaging spectroscopy missions, calling for a quantitative estimation of lignocellulosic plant material as opposed to the sole indication of surface coverage. Therefore, we propose a hybrid model for the retrieval of non-photosynthetic cropland biomass. The workflow included coupling the leaf optical model PROSPECT-PRO with the canopy reflectance model 4SAIL, which allowed us to simulate NPV biomass from carbon-based constituents (CBC) and leaf area index (LAI). PROSAIL-PRO provided a training database for a Gaussian process regression (GPR) algorithm, simulating a wide range of non-photosynthetic vegetation states. Active learning was employed to reduce and optimize the training data set. In addition, we applied spectral dimensionality reduction to condense essential information of non-photosynthetic signals. The resulting NPV-GPR model was successfully validated against soybean field data with normalized root mean square error (nRMSE) of 13.4% and a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.85. To demonstrate mapping capability, the NPV-GPR model was tested on a PRISMA hyperspectral image acquired over agricultural areas in the North of Munich, Germany. Reliable estimates were mainly achieved over senescent vegetation areas as suggested by model uncertainties. The proposed workflow is the first step towards the quantification of non-photosynthetic cropland biomass as a next-generation product from near-term operational missions, such as CHIME

Historical land use dataset of the Carpathian region (1819–1980)

We produced the first spatially explicit, cross-border, digital map of long-term (160 years) land use in the Carpathian Ecoregion, the Hungarian part of the Pannonian plains and the historical region of Moravia in the Czech Republic. We mapped land use in a regular 2 × 2 km point grid. Our dataset comprises of 91,310 points covering 365,240 km2 in seven countries (Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and Romania). We digitized three time layers: (1) for the Habsburg period, we used maps of the second Habsburg military survey from years 1819–1873 at the scale 1:28,800 and the Szatmari's maps from years 1855–1858 at scale 1:57,600; (2) The World Wars period was covered by national topographic maps from years 1915–1945 and scales here ranged between 1:20,000–1:100,000; and (3) the Socialist period was mapped from national topographic maps for the years 1950–1983 at scales between 1:25,000–1:50,000. We collected metadata about the years of mapping and map sources. We used a hierarchical legend for our maps, so that the land use classification for the entire region consisted of 9 categories at the most general level and of 22 categories depending on the period and a country