Recently, global climate change discussions have become more prominent, and forests are considered as the ecosystems most at risk by the consequences of climate change. Wildfires are among one of the main drivers leading to losses in forested areas. The increasing availability of free remotely sensed data has enabled the precise locations of wildfires to be reliably monitored. A wildfire data inventory was created by integrating global positioning system (GPS) polygons with data collected from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomalies product between 2012 and 2017 for Amol County, northern Iran. The GPS polygon dataset from the state wildlife organization was gathered through extensive field surveys. The integrated inventory dataset, along with sixteen conditioning factors (topographic, meteorological, vegetation, anthropological, and hydrological factors), was used to evaluate the potential of different machine learning (ML) approaches for the spatial prediction of wildfire susceptibility. The applied ML approaches included an artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF). All ML approaches were trained using 75% of the wildfire inventory dataset and tested using the remaining 25% of the dataset in the four-fold cross-validation (CV) procedure. The CV method is used for dealing with the randomness effects of the training and testing dataset selection on the performance of applied ML approaches. To validate the resulting wildfire susceptibility maps based on three different ML approaches and four different folds of inventory datasets, the true positive and false positive rates were calculated. In the following, the accuracy of each of the twelve resulting maps was assessed through the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve. The resulting CV accuracies were 74%, 79% and 88% for the ANN, SVM and RF, respectively.

We used remote sensing techniques and machine learning to detect and map landslides, and landslide susceptibility in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. We located 152 landslides using a combination of interferometry synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), Google Earth (GE), and field surveys. Of the total slide locations, 80% (122 landslides) were utilized for training the selected algorithms, and the remaining 20% (30 landslides) were applied for validation purposes. We employed 17 conditioning factors, including slope angle, aspect, elevation, curvature, profile curvature, stream power index (SPI), topographic wetness index (TWI), lithology, soil type, land cover, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance to river, distance to fault, distance to road, river density, fault density, and road density, which were produced from satellite imageries, geological map, soil maps, and a digital elevation model (DEM). We used these factors to produce landslide susceptibility maps using logistic regression (LR), logistic model tree (LMT), and random forest (RF) models. To assess prediction accuracy of the models we employed the following statistical measures: negative predictive value (NPV), sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), specificity, root-mean-squared error (RMSE), accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Our results indicated that the AUC was 92%, 90%, and 88% for the LMT, LR, and RF algorithms, respectively. To assess model performance, we also applied non-parametric statistical tests of Friedman and Wilcoxon, where the results revealed that there were no practical differences among the used models in the study area. While landslide mapping in tropical environment such as Cameron Highlands remains difficult, the remote sensing (RS) along with machine learning techniques, such as the LMT model, show promise for landslide susceptibility mapping in the study area.

Gully erosion is a severe form of soil erosion that results in a wide range of environmental problems such as, dams’ sedimentation, destruction of transportation and energy transmission lines, decreasing and losing farmland productivity, and land degradation. The main objective of this study is to accurately map the areas prone to gully erosion, by developing two machine learning (ML) models, namely artificial neural network (ANN) and random forest (RF) models within 4-fold cross-validation (CV). Moreover, we used the multi-collinearity analysis to select 11 variables among 15 conditioning factors to train the ML models for gully erosion susceptibility mapping (GESM). Lamerd county, Iran, is chosen for a study area because Lamerd county is one of the most affected areas by gully erosion in this country. From 232 gully samples, 75% was used to train the two ML models and the rest of the samples (25%) were used to validate the generated GEMSs using 4-fold CV. The RF model produced a higher accuracy with an accuracy value of 93%. The GEMS generated by the RF model shows that the areas classified as highly vulnerable and very highly vulnerable are 1,869 ha and 5,148 ha, respectively. Results from the two models indicated that the most vulnerable land use/landcover class is bare land because of the low vegetation cover. The outcome of this study can help managers in Lamerd county to mitigate the soil erosion problem and prevent future gully erosion by taking preventive measures.

Salinity as an important property of soil plays a major role in reducing the fertility in the world. Accurate information about the spatial change of soil salinity is essential for sustainable soil management and utilization in agriculture lands. For this purpose, 150 soil samples were collected from Dashte-e-Tabriz Iran and tested and soil salinity was estimated by land surface parameters including elevation, aspect, length of slope, wetness index, slope and normalized difference vegetation index as basic parameters. In order to model and predict the salinity, ordinary kriging (OK), artificial neural networks (ANN) and multiple linear regressions (MLR) were used. Accuracy of models was evaluated by the coefficient of determination (R²), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). Based on Pearson correlation, elevation, normalized difference vegetation and wetness indices were selected for soil salinity spatial modeling from six land surface parameters. The results showed that the ANN had the lowest RMSE and highest R2. The values of R2, RMSE and MAE were 0.36, 25.89 and 17.06 for regression and 0.56, 17.70 and 13.05 for OK and 0.69, 16.06 and 11.60 for ANN, respectively, which indicated more accuracy of ANN in comparison with MLR and OK.

Ecotourism is a major tourism dimension that has received significant attention in recent years. It is widely known that the tourism industry, and in particular ecotourism, makes a significant contribution to sustainable development. In this context, the West Azerbaijan province is one of most important tourist destinations in Iran for attracting tourists interested in nature. The main purpose of this study was to analyze and map the potential for sustainable ecotourism development. The research methodology was developed based on GIS multi-criteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA) techniques, using 28 spatial indicators. For this purpose, areas with the potential for attracting tourists were identified and the effective factors for increasing and decreasing tourism development activities were evaluated by GIS analysis. The method used as a multi-criteria spatial decision-making technique is based on the network analysis process and its combination with fuzzy logic is very effective for increasing the accuracy of the model and obtaining more realistic results. According to the results of this study, West Azerbaijan, due to its potential, including some areas unknown to tourists and even tourism planners, could be introduced as a nature tourism hub in the northwest of the country. The detailed tourism sustainability map obtained, at the scale of 1/25,000, could be used as a basis for regional planning and sustainable ecotourism development. In this context, the results could also be critical for tourism companies, agencies and local stakeholders and organizations for various applications, such as investment and development of tourism hospitality facilities and infrastructure in high potential areas. The research can also be considered as progressive in tourism research and supports future research on the selection of beneficial criteria and the application of efficient methods for tourism sustainability assessment and mapping.