Description: The accurate assessment of selected soil constituents can provide valuable indicators to identify and monitor land changes coupled with degradation which are frequent phenomena in semiarid regions. Two approaches for the quantification of soil organic carbon, iron oxides, and clay content based on field and laboratory spectroscopy of natural surfaces are tested. (1) A physical approach which is based on spectral absorption feature analysis is applied. For every soil constituent, a set of diagnostic spectral features is selected and linked with chemical reference data by multiple linear regression (MLR) techniques. (2) Partial least squares regression (PLS) as an exclusively statistical multivariate method is applied for comparison. Regression models are developed based on extensive ground reference data of 163 sampled sites collected in the Thicket Biome, South Africa, where land changes are observed due to intensive overgrazing. The approaches are assessed upon their prediction performance and significance in regard to a future quantification of soil constituents over large areas using imaging spectroscopy.

Description: The climate change debate has increased the need for knowledge on both long- and short-term regional environmental changes. In general, these changes may often be a product of multiple causes, which complicates the separation of single driving forces. In this review we focus on current water budget changes in Germany’s capital region, Berlin-Brandenburg, over the last 30 years. Available studies from a variety of disciplines (e.g. hydrology, water engineering, landscape ecology, nature conservation) were analysed in order to (1) identify both local and regional hydrological changes, (2) reveal their potential causes, and (3) discuss responses of ecosystems and society. These studies show that the Berlin-Brandenburg region is widely characterised by decreasing groundwater recharge, leading to decreasing groundwater and lake levels as well as decreasing fluvial discharge. These trends result both from complex, regional human impacts (e.g. long-term effects of hydro-melioration and changes in forest composition) and more general climate warming. The observed and assumed (future) changes of the regional water balance have been creating, and will continue to create, multifaceted impacts on existing ecosystems and society (e.g. wetland drying, decrease of biodiversity, decrease of productivity of grasslands and forests, increasing conflicts of interests). Several efforts to respond to the regional water deficit problem have already been undertaken, comprising for instance land-use optimisation, wetland restoration measures and the reestablishment of mixed deciduous forests. In general, however, the reviewed regional material on this topic reveals that the number and complexity of empirical studies are still poor. Thus, for both the identification and the explanation of current water balance changes and their effects, as well as for development and implementation of adaptive strategies, further multidisciplinary research efforts at different scales, including interregional comparisons, are required. Furthermore, both the observation of hydrological changes and the evaluation of adaptive and mitigative responses require at least continuous or, even better, extended monitoring efforts.

Description: Information on soil clay and organic carbon content on a regional to local scale is vital for a multitude of reasons such as soil conservation, precision agriculture, and possibly also in the context of global environmental change. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of multi-annual hyperspectral images acquired with the HyMap sensor (450–2480 nm) during three flight campaigns in 2004, 2005, and 2008 for the prediction of clay and organic carbon content on croplands by means of partial least squares regression (PLSR). Supplementary, laboratory reflectance measurements were acquired under standardized conditions. Laboratory spectroscopy yielded prediction errors between 19.48 and 35.55 g kg−1 for clay and 1.92 and 2.46 g kg−1 for organic carbon. Estimation errors with HyMap image spectra ranged from 15.99 to 23.39 g kg−1 for clay and 1.61 to 2.13 g kg−1 for organic carbon. A comparison of parameter predictions from different years confirmed the predictive ability of the models. BRDF effects increased model errors in the overlap of neighboring flight strips up to 3 times, but an appropriated preprocessing method can mitigate these negative influences. Using multi-annual image data, soil parameter maps could be successively complemented. They are exemplarily shown providing field specific information on prediction accuracy and image data source.