Armando Apan

University of Southern Queensland · School of Surveying and Built Environment

Military operations have long been recognized to cause significant environmental consequences. However, research on the environmental impacts of military operations remains fragmented despite the rise of modern technologies, including remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS). Hence, this study sought to review the literature on u...

Tigers (Panthera tigris) are an endangered species facing severe threats of population decline worldwide, and understanding their spatio-temporal activity patterns and habitat use in different forest management regimes is crucial for their conservation and management. We analyzed systematically collected camera trap data using occupancy modelling a...

We modelled the hydrological response of a central Himalayan country Nepal in HEC-HMS hydrological model, disaggregating the country into three large basins (Eastern, Central and Western) and 94 sub-basins, using daily precipitation and temperature data from 176 and 106 observation stations, respectively. The models were calibrated and validated at...

The environmental justice (EJ) movement has evolved over five decades, encapsulating diverse theories, principles, frameworks, and practices. Despite considerable advancements in this field, the nuances of EJ in the Anthropocene era, along with its monitoring and evaluation, remain ambiguous. This paper endeavors to bridge this gap by amalgamating...

A systematic literature review (SLR) on ecological resettlements and conservation-led displacements (hereafter ‘ER’) is essential for guiding future research and conservation strategies, yet it has not been conducted. We performed a comprehensive two-stage review—a review of reviews and a review of empirical articles from Web of Science and Scopus—...

Current literature review frameworks often lack quantification of literature volume, guidance on keyword inclusion, confidence in identifying knowledge gaps, and the formulation of research questions, which can lead to potential bias in research. This undermines the validity and reliability of reviews. In this paper, we aim to enhance the systemati...

Global land-use changes impact soil’s ability to perform essential functions. This study investigates whether soil organic carbon (SOC) can be conserved without altering land use in tradi�tional farming systems and degraded natural forests, focusing on ‘disturbed’ agricultural soils and ‘undisturbed’ forest soils. We also examine the influence of d...

In this study, we assessed the accomplishments and shortcomings of an exhaustive collection of energy policies of Nepal over four decades, using a five‐dimensional energy security framework (availability, affordability, technology, sustainability and governance) for sustainable development. We adopted a mixed‐method approach involving thorough revi...

A recent renaissance of industrial hemp has been driven by a plethora of ecologically amicable products and their profitability. To identify its environment and economic fate across the value chain (VC), this study conducts a systematic review of 98 studies published in ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and Scopus‐indexed journals. The thematic conten...

Tigers are one of the most recognized and charismatic predator on earth, yet their habitats have declined, their numbers are low, and substantial threats to their survival persist. Although, tiger conservation is high priority globally and tigers are generally considered well studied, there has been no comprehensive global assessment of tiger-relat...

Honey bees play a vital role in providing essential ecosystem services and contributing to global agriculture. However, the potential effect of climate change on honey bee distribution is still not well understood. This study aims to identify the most influential bioclimatic and environmental variables, assess their impact on honey bee distribution...

Scientists widely agree that anthropogenically driven climate change significantly impacts vegetation growth, particularly in floodplain areas, by altering river flow and flood regimes. This impact will accelerate in the future, according to climate change projections. For example, in Australia, climate change has been attributed to a decrease in w...

Tropical montane forests (TMFs) are highly valuable for their above-ground biomass (AGB) and their potential to sequester carbon, but they remain understudied. Sentinel-1, -2, biophysical data and Machine Learning were used to estimate and map the AGB and above-ground carbon (AGC) stocks in Benguet, Philippines. Non-destructive field AGB measuremen...

Research on social aspects of energy and those applying machine learning (ML) is limited compared to the ‘hard’ disciplines such as science and engineering. We aim to contribute to this niche through this multidisciplinary study integrating energy, social science and ML. Specifically, we aim: (i) to compare the applicability of different ML models...

Honey bees play a vital role in providing essential ecosystem services and contributing to global agriculture. However, the potential effect of climate change on honey bee distribution is still not well understood. This study aims to identify the most influential bioclimatic and environmental variables, assess their impact on honey bee distribution...

The demand side of ecosystem service (ES), especially preference and perception of supply and interactions among ES, is an important yet underexplored research area for landscape planning and management in human-dominated landscapes. Taking a case of multifunctional landscape in the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region, we carried out a social survey of ES,...

Human-elephant conflict (HEC) is a severe conservation, socio-economic and environmental issue of forests and ecosystems in elephant inhabiting countries, including Sri Lanka. Due to the rapid growth of human and elephant populations, both struggles to share limited land resources. The major causes and contexts of HEC in Sri Lanka include land use...

The accuracy of most SAR-based flood classification and segmentation derived from semi-automated algorithms is often limited due to complicated radar backscatter. However, deep learning techniques, now widely applied in image classifications, have demonstrated excellent potential for mapping complex scenes and improving flood mapping accuracy. Ther...

One of the major impacts of climate change in the agricultural sector relates to changes in the suitability of areas that are used for planting crops. Since peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is one of the most important sources of protein, an assessment of the potential shifts in peanut crop planting areas is critical. In this study, we evaluated the ef...

As a breakthrough in geographical data science, two high-resolution (10m) global land cover products were published by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and European Space Agency (ESA). Yet, the accuracy and applicability of those maps have not been diagnosed in the Himalayas which is characterized by multifunctional and heterogen...

Community forestry is becoming an increasingly popular forest management model worldwide. Community structure, property rights, and institutional perspectives of community forestry have been discussed so far. Yet, the question of how to integrate scientific knowledge into indigenous practices has not been sufficiently articulated, and this is the m...

This study modelled the relationships between vegetation response and available water below the soil surface using Terra’s moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and soil water content (SWC). The Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) interface known as ArcSWAT was used in ArcGIS for the g...

Tropical montane forests (TMF) play a vital role in providing numerous ecosystem services. This ecosystem is characterized by towering mountains, cold weather, tall trees such as pine, and dwarfed plants. Although the combination of optical and radar imagery has shown promise in land use and land cover (LULC) mapping, only a handful of studies have...

Trade-offs in ecosystem services (ES) is increasingly becoming a pressing issue in sustainability science, to deal with supply constraints of landscape and divergence in demand from local and global stakeholders. Agroforestry is a well acknowledged and established management practice to minimize the trade-offs, and to sustainably manage the contest...

Sentinel-2 satellite data has been used for forest cover monitoring for almost five years. Mapping with Sentinel data will be a cost-effective solution for Sri Lanka, where the lack of updated land cover maps with high spatial resolution is a significant challenge in the land resource management of the country. A study area of about 5,000 km2 locat...

Identifying drought-tolerant crops/genotypes may provide a sustainable solution to improve productivity on rain-fed sodic soils. However, the identification of genotypes tolerant to sodicity has been impeded by a lack of suitable, high-throughput techniques. Here, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing coupled with field experimental...

Monitoring crops area is essential in achieving food security. The production coverage, crop types, and their growth phases are the key for monitoring food supply. Remote sensing plays a critical role to provide reliable data on regional basis supporting food production monitoring. In this research, we evaluated the use of Phased Array-type L-band...

Engineering Mathematics requires that problem-solving should be implemented through ongoing assessments; hence the prediction of student performance using continuous assessments remains an important task for engineering educators, mainly to monitor and improve their teaching practice. This paper develops probabilistic models to predict weighted sco...

Rehabilitation of disturbed sites is a complex process requiring constant monitoring and assessment, with current methods being somewhat obsolete, manual, and rather fraught with risk in terms of beneficial outcomes of the evaluation. This study challenges the status quo of manual assessments and build a new methodology to recognise a clear need fo...

Issues of environmental degradation, finite quantity and uneven spatial distribution of fuels in nature, and growing demand accentuated by volatility of oil prices have led to the global clean renewable energy transition (RET). With an objective of examining the current knowledge-stock on RET, we reviewed 248 journal publications pooled from three...

While our knowledge of tropical montane forests (TMFs) is limited, human activities continue to damage them. Remote sensing has shown its usefulness for forest investigations with difficult terrain. This study systematically reviewed the applications of spaceborne remote sensing to TMFs with regards to time, spatial distribution, journal publicatio...

Plants grown on sodic soils can suffer from macronutrient deficiencies, such as calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and potassium (K), reducing health and growth. Nutrient concentrations in plant tissue could potentially provide a signal to identify cultivars tolerant to sodic conditions. However, conventional approaches to diagnosing crop nutrient and c...

Climate change has started impacting species, ecosystems, genetic diversity within species, and ecological interactions and is thus a serious threat to conserving biodiversity globally. In the absence of adequate adaptation measures, biodiversity may continue to decline, and many species will possibly become extinct. Given that global temperature c...

Rapidly changing climate is likely to modify the spatial distribution of both flora and fauna. Land use change continues to alter the availability and quality of habitat and further intensifies the effects of climate change on wildlife species. We used an ensemble modeling approach to predict changes in habitat suitability for an iconic wildlife sp...

As an important domain of sustainability science, trade-offs in ecosystem services (ES) is crucial for spatial planning to sustainably manage natural resources while satisfying the needs of local and non-local beneficiaries. However, there is still a growing debate in understanding, characterization, and visualization of the trade-off relationships...

Sodic soils adversely affect crop production over extensive areas of rain-fed cropping worldwide, with particularly large areas in Australia. Crop phenotyping may assist in identifying cultivars tolerant to soil sodicity. However, studies to identify the most appropriate traits and reliable tools to assist crop phenotyping on sodic soil are limited...

Water stress limits wheat growth and the yield on rain-fed sodic soils. Appropriate selection of traits and novel methods are required to forecast yield and to identify water stress tolerant wheat genotypes on sodic soils. In this study, we proposed a thermal remote sensing and machine learning-based approach to help predict the biomass and grain y...

Crop water use can be a useful indicator of in-season crop conditions including health and greenness on sodic soils. However, in-field manual measurements of crop water use can be tedious, time and labour-intensive and may also exhibit large spatial variability, and inefficient for surveying large areas. Here we propose a novel approach to estimate...

Demand for food and other agricultural products is projected to increase by 50% globally by 2050. This increasing food demand places growing pressure on agricultural production at a time where there is little scope to expand agricultural lands. In addition, other constraining factors, such as climatic and soil constraints negatively impact agricult...

Aim Rapidly changing climate is likely to modify the spatial distribution of both flora and fauna. Land use change continues to alter the availability and quality of habitat and further intensifies the effects of climate change on wildlife species. We used an ensemble modelling approach to predict changes in habitat suitability for an iconic wildli...

Sodicity is a major soil constraint in many arid and semi-arid regions worldwide, including Australia, which adversely affects the ability of crops to take up water and nutrients from the soil, reducing yield. Reliable methods and tools are required for appropriate selection of traits, may provide a better understanding of crop responses to multipl...

This chapter develops intelligent data analytics approaches to compare the frequently used drought-monitoring indices and applies the change-point analysis technique to detect subtle changes in the drought index trends for natural hazard and disaster risk mitigation. The Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), used in this chapt...

Because of its negative effect on health, aflatoxin has become one of the most important mycotoxins in the world. As climate stress is one of the main triggers of aflatoxin incidence, climate change could affect its geographic distribution. The primary aim of this study was to examine the effect of climate change on the future distribution of aflat...

Climate change is an emerging threat for biodiversity conservation. It has already started impacting species assemblages and ecosystem dynamics. The greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) is an iconic and globally threatened megaherbivore. Once widespread across the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, there were fewer than 500 r...

Climate change is an emerging threat for biodiversity conservation. It has already started impacting species assemblages and ecosystem dynamics. The greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) is an iconic and globally threatened megaherbivore. Once widespread across the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, there were fewer than 500 r...

Wheat production in southern Queensland, Australia is adversely affected by soil sodicity. Crop phenotyping could be useful to improve productivity in such soils. This research focused on adapting high-throughput phenotyping of crop biophysical attributes to monitor crop health, nutrient deficiencies and plant moisture availability. We conducted an...

Rice is one of the world’s most dominant staple foods, and hence rice farming plays a vital role in a nation’s economy and food security. To examine the applicability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for large areas, we propose an approach to determine rice age, date of planting (dop), and date of harvest (doh) using a time series of Sentinel...

Greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) is one of the most iconic wildlife species in the world. Once reduced to fewer than 500 during the 1960s, its global population has been recovering and is now over 3500, thanks to effective conservation programs in India and Nepal, the only two countries in the world where this species is found....

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of drought globally with potentially significant consequences for grasslands. We examined grassland responses to a long-term drought on the Darling Downs, eastern Australia, using the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), a remotely sensed measure of primary productivity. This extreme dr...

Mangrove forests are important carbon (C) sinks in the tropics that are threatened by tropical deforestation and land use conversion, especially in Southeast Asia. Yet quantitative estimates are limited on the biomass (i.e. aboveground, belowground, downed woody debris) and tree C stocks of secondary, and converted mangroves in Southeast Asia. Whil...

Leaf area index (LAI) quantifies the amount of foliage area per unit ground surface area. A dimensionless quantity (i.e. LAI = leaf area / ground area, m2 / m2), it is an important variable to predict photosynthetic primary production and for monitoring vegetation dynamics. The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of Sentinel 2 image-derive...

Strategic management of water resources in drought-vulnerable regions can be greatly hampered by frequent, severe and long-lasting droughts. To enable better drought relief policy and amicable solutions and proactive actions for preparedness and mitigation of drought impacts, this study adopts a spatio-temporal methodology for the assessment of dro...

Mapping of peanut crops is essential in supporting peanut production, yield prediction, and commodity forecasting. While ground-based surveys can be used over small areas, the development of remote-sensing technologies could provide rapid and inexpensive crop area estimates with high accuracy over large regions. Some of these recent earth observati...

Although herbicide drifts are known worldwide and recognized as one of the major risks for crop security in the agriculture sector, the traditional assessment of damage in cotton crops caused by herbicide drifts has several limitations. The aim of this study was to assess proximal sensor and modelling techniques in the detection of phenoxy herbicid...

A warming world is expected to increase climate variability, including the duration and severity of drought, which may result in significant vegetation change, impacting the primary productivity and composition of grassland ecosystems. Understanding the effects of a more extreme climate on grassland function is critical, given their importance both...

The recent launch of the Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (multispectral) missions offers a new opportunity for land-based biomass mapping and monitoring especially in the tropics where deforestation is highest. Yet, unlike in agriculture and inland land uses, the use of Sentinel imagery has not been evaluated for biomass retrieval in mangrove fores...

The recent launch of the Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (multispectral) missions offers a new opportunity for land-based biomass mapping and monitoring especially in the tropics where deforestation is highest. Yet, unlike in agriculture and inland land uses, the use of Sentinel imagery has not been evaluated for biomass retrieval in mangrove fores...

Drought characterization is crucial for identifying impacts on irrigation, agriculture, hydrologic engineering, and water resources management. This case study demonstrates the scientific relevance of the standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI) as a robust drought metric that incorporates influence of supply-demand balance. Using...

Mangrove forests are important carbon sinks in the tropics, yet tropical mangrove deforestation and land use conversion still persists. Reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from natural and anthropogenic sources in wetlands are important in regional and national emissions inventories. However, very few studies have been conducted to measure...

Purpose The purpose of this paper was to develop an integrated framework for assessing the flood risk and climate adaptation capacity of an urban area and its critical infrastructures to help address flood risk management issues and identify climate adaptation strategies. Design/methodology/approach Using the January 2011 flood in the core suburbs...

The search for better climate change adaptation techniques for addressing environmental and economic issues due to changing climate is of paramount interest in the current era. One of the many ways Pacific Island regions and its people get affected is by dry spells and drought events from extreme climates. A drought is simply a prolonged shortage o...

While studies on deforestation of protected areas (PAs) have been conducted in many parts of the world, no comparative study has been done over an entire country in the tropics. Thus, we conducted a country-wide assessment of forest cover loss in all terrestrial protected areas of the Philippines, covering 198 PAs with a total area of 4.68 million...

Mangrove forests provide many ecosystem goods and services and they contain large amount of carbon (C) especially in their soil. Yet, their global area is still declining owing to conversion to non-forest land uses. While studies have been conducted on mangrove soil C stocks, our knowledge on how C stocks of mangrove forests compare with those of n...

Chronic groundwater decline has become a significant issue in many agricultural landscapes. Remnant ecosystems in these landscapes are also impacted by climate change, which in some areas is predicted to intensify climatic extremes of drought and flooding. As water resources decline, the interplay between groundwater decline and climate change coul...

Savanna fire is a major source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In Australia, savanna fire contributes about 3% of annual GHG emissions reportable to the Kyoto Protocol. In order to reduce GHG emissions from savanna burning, the Australian government has developed and approved a Kyoto compliant savanna controlled burning methodology—the fi...