ABSTRACT
Driven by a constantly accelerating increase of urban population in recent decades, anthropogenic developments changed the Earth’s surface in both regional and global scales. Urban sprawl has become one of the most dynamic processes in the context of global land use transformations. An increasing number of international environmental agreements place global change at the top of international scientific and political agendas, including the Kyoto Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Convention to Combat Desertification and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (McCallum et al. 2006). There are several hundreds of multilateral environmental agreements and bilateral agreements dealing with different aspects of the environment and global change. These agreements require a unique set of information for implementation, monitoring, and compliance. A key component of the data needed within the global change framework is ecosystem-based information.
