Chilgoza pine is an economically and ecologically important evergreen coniferous tree species of the dry and rocky temperate zone, and a native of south Asia. This species is rated as near threatened (NT) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This study hypothesized that climatic, soil and topographic variations strongly influence the distribution pattern and potential habitat suitability prediction of Chilgoza pine. Accordingly, this study was aimed to document the potential habitat suitability variations of Chilgoza pine under varying environmental scenarios by using 37 different environmental variables. The maximum entropy (MaxEnt) algorithm in MaxEnt software was used to forecast the potential habitat suitability under current and future (i.e., 2050s and 2070s) climate change scenarios (i.e., Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs): 245 and 585). A total of 238 species occurrence records were collected from Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and employed to build the predictive distribution model. The results showed that normalized difference vegetation index, mean temperature of coldest quarter, isothermality, precipitation of driest month and volumetric fraction of the coarse soil fragments (>2 mm) were the leading predictors of species presence prediction. High accuracy values (>0.9) of predicted distribution models were recorded, and remarkable shrinkage of potentially suitable habitat of Chilgoza pine was followed by Afghanistan, India and China. The estimated extent of occurrence (EOO) of the species was about 84,938 km², and the area of occupancy (AOO) was about 888 km², with 54 major sub-populations. This study concluded that, as the total predicted suitable habitat under current climate scenario (138,782 km²) is reasonably higher than the existing EOO, this might represent a case of continuous range contraction. Hence, the outcomes of this research can be used to build the future conservation and management plans accordingly for this economically valuable species in the region.

Pakistan is a flood-prone country and almost every year, it is hit by floods of varying magnitudes. This study was conducted to generate a flash flood map using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and frequency ratio (FR) models in the ArcGIS 10.6 environment. Eight flash-flood-causing physical parameters were considered for this study. Five parameters were based on the digital elevation model (DEM), Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS), and Sentinel-2 satellite, including distance from the river and drainage density slope, elevation, and land cover, respectively. Two other parameters were geology and soil, consisting of different rock and soil formations, respectively, where both layers were classified based on their resistance against water percolation. One parameter was rainfall. Rainfall observation data obtained from five meteorological stations exist close to the Chitral District, Pakistan. According to its significant importance in the occurrence of a flash flood, each criterion was allotted an estimated weight with the help of AHP and FR. In the end, all the parameters were integrated using weighted overlay analysis in which the influence value of the drainage density was given the highest value. This gave the output in terms of five flood risk zones: very high risk, high risk, moderate risk, low risk, and very low risk. According to the results, 1168 km², that is, 8% of the total area, showed a very high risk of flood occurrence. Reshun, Mastuj, Booni, Colony, and some other villages were identified as high-risk zones of the study area, which have been drastically damaged many times by flash floods. This study is pioneering in its field and provides policy guidelines for risk managers, emergency and disaster response services, urban and infrastructure planners, hydrologists, and climate scientists.

Hyperspectral images (HSI) are a powerful source of reliable data in various remote sensing applications. But due to the large number of bands, HSI has information redundancy, and methods are often used to reduce the number of spectral bands. Band selection (BS) is used as a preprocessing solution to reduce data volume, increase processing speed, and improve methodology accuracy. However, most conventional BS approaches are unable to fully explain the interaction between spectral bands and evaluate the representation and redundancy of the selected band subset. This study first examines a supervised band selection method that allows the selection of the required number of bands. A deep network with 3D-convolutional layers embedded in a genetic algorithm (GA) The GA uses embedded 3D-CNN (CNNeGA) as a fitness function. GA also considers the parent check box. The parent check box (parent subbands) is designed to make genetic operators more effective. In addition, the effectiveness of increasing the attention layer to a 3D-CNN and converting this model to spike neural networks (SNNs) has been investigated in terms of accuracy and complexity over time. The evaluation of the proposed method and the obtained results are satisfactory. The accuracy improved from 6 to 21 percent. Accuracy between 90 to 99 percent has been obtained in each evaluation mode.

Understanding the spatial growth of cities is crucial for proactive planning and sustainable urbanization. The largest and most densely inhabited megapolis of Pakistan, Karachi, has experienced massive spatial growth not only in the core areas of the city, but also in the city’s suburbs and outskirts over the past decades. In this study, the land use/land cover (LULC) in Karachi was classified using Landsat data and the random forest algorithm from the Google Earth Engine cloud platform for the years 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020. Land use/land cover classification maps as well as an urban sprawl matrix technique were used to analyze the geographical patterns and trends of urban sprawl. Six urban classes, namely, the primary urban core, secondary urban core, sub-urban fringe, scatter settlement, urban open space, and non-urban area, were determined for the exploration of urban landscape changes. Future scenarios of LULC for 2030 were predicted using a CA–Markov model. The study found that the built-up area had expanded in a considerably unpredictable manner, primarily at the expense of agricultural land. The increase in mangroves and grassland and shrub land proved the effectiveness of afforestation programs in improving vegetation coverage in the study area. The investigation of urban landscape alteration revealed that the primary urban core expanded from the core districts, namely, the Central, South, and East districts, and a new urban secondary core emerged in Malir in 2020. The CA–Markov model showed that the total urban built-up area could potentially increase from 584.78 km² in 2020 to 652.59 km² in 2030. The integrated method combining remote sensing, GIS, and an urban sprawl matrix has proven invaluable for the investigation of urban sprawl in a rapidly growing city.

Cropland mapping via remote sensing can provide crucial information for agri-ecological studies. Time series of remote sensing imagery is particularly useful for agricultural land classification. This study investigated the synergistic use of feature selection, Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) segmentation and decision tree classification for cropland mapping using a finer temporal-resolution Landsat-MODIS Enhanced time series in 2007. The enhanced time series extracted 26 layers of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and five NDVI Time Series Indices (TSI) in a subset of agricultural land of Southwest Missouri. A feature selection procedure using the Stepwise Discriminant Analysis (SDA) was performed, and 10 optimal features were selected as input data for OBIA segmentation, with an optimal scale parameter obtained by quantification assessment of topological and geometric object differences. Using the segmented metrics in a decision tree classifier, an overall classification accuracy of 90.87% was achieved. Our study highlights the advantage of OBIA segmentation and classification in reducing noise from in-field heterogeneity and spectral variation. The crop classification map produced at 30 m resolution provides spatial distributions of annual and perennial crops, which are valuable for agricultural monitoring and environmental assessment studies.

Hyperspectral imagery is widely used for analyzing substances and objects, specifically focusing on their classification. The advancement of processing capabilities and the emergence of cloud computing platforms have made deep learning (DL) models increasingly popular for accurately and efficiently hyperspectral images (HSI) classification. In addition, utilizing image-processing techniques that employ specific mathematical operations for feature extraction and noise reduction further improves the precision of HSI classification. This study introduces the ResMorCNN model, which utilizes 3-D convolutional layers and morphology mathematics to extract structural information, shapes, and interregional interactions from HSIs. These features are then incorporated into the model's layers using residual connections. This approach significantly enhances the classification accuracy of datasets with different characteristics. In fact, the proposed model achieves an average accuracy higher than the top-performing DL method in a competition. To evaluate the overall effectiveness of the proposed method, it was tested on four distinct and comprehensive datasets, Indian Pines, Pavia University, Houston University, and Salinas. These datasets were carefully selected, taking into account factors such as scale, dispersion, and sample size. The overall accuracy results obtained for each evaluated dataset were 97.81%, 99.33%, 98.67%, and 99.71%, respectively. This demonstrates an average improvement of 3.37% compared to the results of the best-performing method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ResMorCNN model for various applications that require accurate and efficient classification of HSI.