Due to the excessive use of natural resources in the contemporary world, the importance of ecological and environmental condition modeling has increased. Wetlands and cities represent the natural and artificial strategic areas that affect ecosystem conditions. Changes in the ecological conditions of these areas have a great impact on the conditions of the global ecosystem. Therefore, modeling spatiotemporal variations of the ecological conditions in these areas is critical. This study was aimed at comparing degrees of variation among surface ecological conditions due to natural and unnatural factors. Consequently, the surface ecological conditions of Gomishan city and Gomishan wetland in Iran were modeled for a period of 30 years, and the spatiotemporal variations were evaluated and compared with each other. To this end, 20 Landsat 5, 7, and 8, and 432 Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), monthly land surface temperature (LST) (MOD11C3) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) (MOD13C3) products were utilized. The surface ecological conditions were modeled according to the Remote Sensing-based Ecological Index (RSEI), and the spatiotemporal variation of the RSEI values in the study area (Gomishan city, Gomishan wetland) were evaluated and compared with each other. According to MODIS products, the mean of the LST and NDVI variance values for the study area (Gomishan city, Gomishan wetland) were obtained to be 6.5 °C (2.1, 12.1) and 0.009 (0.005, 0.013), respectively. The highest LST and NDVI temporal variations were found for Gomishan wetland near the Caspian Sea. According to Landsat images, Gomishan wetland and Gomishan city have the highest and lowest temporal variations in surface biophysical characteristics, respectively. The mean RSEI for the study area (Gomishan city, Gomishan wetland) was 0.43 (0.65, 0.29), respectively. Additionally, the mean Coefficient of Variation (CV) of RSEI for the study area (Gomishan city, Gomishan wetland) was 0.10 (0.88, 0.51), respectively. The surface ecological conditions of Gomishan city were worse than those of the Gomishan wetland at all dates. Temporal variations in the surface ecological conditions of Gomishan wetland were greater than those of the study area and Gomishan city. These results can provide useful and effective information for environmental planning and decision-making to improve ecological conditions, protect the environment, and support sustainable ecosystem development.

Timely and accurate information on crop mapping and monitoring is necessary for agricultural resources management. Accordingly, the applicability of the proposed classification-feature selection ensemble procedure with different feature sets for crop mapping is investigated. Here, we produced various feature sets including spectral bands, spectral indices, variation of spectral index, texture, and combinations of features to map different types of crops. By using various feature sets and the random forest (RF) classifier, the crop maps were created. In aiming to determine the most relevant and distinctive features, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and RF-variable importance measure feature selection methods were examined. The classification-feature selection ensemble procedure was adapted to combine the outputs of different feature sets from the better feature selection method using majority votes. Multi-temporal Sentinel-2 data has been used in Ghale-Nou county of Tehran, Iran. The performance of RF was efficient in crop mapping especially by spectral bands and texture in combination with other feature sets. Our results showed that the PSO-based feature selection leads to a more accurate classification than the RF-variable importance measure, in almost all feature sets for all crop types. The RF classifier-PSO ensemble procedure for crop mapping outperformed the RF classifier in each feature set with regard to the class-wise and overall accuracies (OA) (of about 2.7–7.4% increases in OA and 0.48–3.68% (silage maize), 0–1.61% (rice), 2.82–15.43% (alfalfa), and 10.96–41.13% (vegetables) improvement in F-scores for all feature sets). The proposed method could mainly be useful to differentiate between heterogeneous crop fields (e.g., vegetables in this study) due to their more obtained omission/commission errors reduction.

The increase of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and the formation of heat island in megacities have become an emerging environmental concern. The main objective of this study is to predict the intensity of Tehran’s heat island in the year 2033 based on historical changes of land cover and LST. For this purpose, Landsat satellite images were integrated with meteorological stations’ measurements from 1985 to 2017. The Cellular Automata-Markov (CA-Markov) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models were used to predict the land cover changes and to the modelling of the Surface Urban Heat Island Intensity (SUHII), Surface Urban Heat Island Ratio Index (SUHRI) was used. Subsequently, using statistical analysis of the effect of historical land cover changes on LST variations, SUHII for 2033 was predicted. Our findings show that within this period, the built-up lands increased significantly from 39% in 1985 to 65% in 2017. The intensity of heat island increased with an increase in the value of SUHII from 0.02 to 0.19. Our predictive analysis reveals that the intensity of the Tehran’s heat island will increase to 0.32 by 2033. Our conclusions draw attentions to the increasing LST now and in the future in Tehran so that urban planners and local authorities take adequate actions for controlling its environmental impacts.