Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) is one of the main air quality pollutants of concern in many urban and industrial areas worldwide, and particularly in the European region, where in 2017 almost 20 countries exceeded the NO₂ annual limit values imposed by the European Commission Directive 2008/50/EC (EEA, 2019). NO₂ pollution monitoring and regulation is a necessary task to help decision makers to search for a sustainable solution for environmental quality and population health status improvement. In this study, we propose a comparative analysis of the tropospheric NO₂ column spatial configuration over Europe between similar periods in 2019 and 2020, based on the ESA Copernicus Sentinel-5P products. The results highlight the NO₂ pollution dynamics over the abrupt transition from a normal condition situation to the COVID-19 outbreak context, characterized by a short-time decrease of traffic intensities and industrial activities, revealing remarkable tropospheric NO₂ column number density decreases even of 85% in some of the European big cities. The validation approach of the satellite-derived data, based on a cross-correlation analysis with independent data from ground-based observations, provided encouraging values of the correlation coefficients (R²), ranging between 0.5 and 0.75 in different locations. The remarkable decrease of NO₂ pollution over Europe during the COVID-19 lockdown is highlighted by S-5P products and confirmed by the Industrial Production Index and air traffic volumes.

Monitoring uncontained built-up area expansion remains a complex challenge for the development and implementation of a sustainable planning system. In this regard, proper planning requires accurate monitoring tools and up-to-date information on rapid territorial transformations. The purpose of the study was to assess built-up area expansion, comparing two freely available and widely used datasets, respectively, Corine Land Cover and Landsat, to each other, as well as the ground truth, with the goal of identifying the most cost-effective and reliable tool. The analysis was based on the largest post-socialist city in the European Union, the capital of Romania, Bucharest, and its neighboring Ilfov County, from 1990 to 2018. This study generally represents a new approach to measuring the process of urban expansion, offering insights about the strengths and limitations of the two datasets through a multi-level territorial perspective. The results point out discrepancies between the datasets, both at the macro-scale level and at the administrative unit’s level. On the macro-scale level, despite the noticeable differences, the two datasets revealed the spatiotemporal magnitude of the expansion of the built-up area and can be a useful tool for supporting the decision-making process. On the smaller territorial scale, detailed comparative analyses through five case-studies were conducted, indicating that, if used alone, limitations on the information that can be derived from the datasets would lead to inaccuracies, thus significantly limiting their potential to be used in the development of enforceable regulation in urban planning.

Computer modeling of sporadic and isolated patches of mountain permafrost distribution is difficult to implement without overestimating it. The main challenge is to determine the very areas where the criteria for permafrost maintenance are met. This paper aims to modeling the permafrost distribution in the Southern Carpathians (SC), a typical marginal periglacial mountain range. For this purpose, a collection of 883 bottom temperature of late winter snow cover (BTS) points was used as a proxy for permafrost presence or absence in order to train several machine learning models. The performances of each model were evaluated with AUC with varying between 0.99 for Maxent and 0.74 for K‐nearest neighbors and most models (five) exhibiting values between 0.82 and 0.86. Other tests such as confusion matrices, sensitivity analyses, data shuffling, and data size reduction tests indicated that Maxent, AdaBoost, and support vector machine offered the best results while logistic regression, neural network, and gradient boosting exhibited rather poor permafrost distributions. The final ensemble median model indicated a total permafrost area of 19.2 km ² occupying 1%–9% of the alpine area of the studied massifs. NDVI proved crucial for permafrost prediction because it allows delimiting the debris surfaces where permafrost is probable.

The agricultural mountain landscape in the Romanian Carpathians follows the same change trend in other European mountains, from variety and individuality to simplification and uniformization. Our paper proposes two complementary case studies from the Southern Carpathians—Poiana Mărului and Fundata, representative areas for the entire Carpathian ecoregion. The research focuses on a remote sensing approach with Corona KH-4B (1968) and Planet Scope (2018) images at 2.0–3.0 m resolution used for mapping arable plots pattern and size change. Landscape transformation modelling is focused on four-hectare sampled grid for both case study areas, followed by a landscape metric analysis. Fundata area is the most transformed, where arable plots disappeared under the service-based economy pressure. Poiana Mărului shows an earlier stage of landscape transformation, where the arable land abandonment process is incipient. The spatial and statistical analysis and field survey confirmed that tourism changed the traditional agricultural landscape, generating potential environmental conflicts and indicating the sustainability degree.

Forest habitat fragmentation is one of the global environmental issues of concern as a result of forest management practices and socioeconomic drivers. In this context, a constant evaluation of natural habitat conditions still remains a challenge in order to achieve a general image of the environmental state of a protected area for proper sustainable management. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the evolution of forest habitat in the last 40 years, focusing on Bucegi Natural Park, one of the most frequented protected areas in Romania, as relevant for highly human-impacted areas. Our approach integrates a historical panchromatic Corona KH-9 image from 1977 and present-day Sentinel-2 multispectral data from 2020 in order to calculate a series of spatial metrics that reveal changes in the pattern of the forest habitat and illustrate forest habitat fragmentation density. Object-based oriented analysis with supervised maximum likelihood classification was employed for the production of forest cover fragmentation maps. Ten landscape metrics were adapted to the analysis context, from patch statistics to proximity index. The results show a general growth of the forest surface but also an increase in habitat fragmentation in areas where tourism was developed. Fragmentation indices explain that larger and compact patches feature natural park protected forests after the spruce–fir secondary canopies were grown during the last 4–5 decades. The number of patches decreased to half, and their average size is double that of before. The method can be of extensive use for environmental monitoring in protected areas management and for understanding the environmental history connected to present-day problems that are to be fixed under rising human pressure.