Remote sensing from space is the only feasible method for regularly mapping woody shrub cover over large areas, an important application because extensive woody shrub encroachment into former grasslands has been seen in arid and semi-arid grasslands around the world during the last 150 years.
Having won its independence from Spain in 1821, the fledgling Republic of Mexico sought to gain control of its northern reaches, which under the Spanish had functioned as an extensive and largely empty bulwark against encroachment by competing French and British empires to the north.
Human encroachment on the coasts is extensive and expected to increase over the coming decades.
A decline in summer farming practices, during the twentieth century, has caused a large-scale encroachment of trees and shrubs leading to extensive landscape changes and decreased biodiversity.
Shrub encroachment can be explained by the abandonment of extensive livestock farming and changes to land use, and it is a common problem in the Mediterranean mountain pastures of Europe, with direct effects on biodiversity and landscape quality.
In recent decades, pastoralism has been in decline because of threats posed by rapid encroachment of mechanized rain-fed agriculture, human population growth and other human activities that force extensive livestock production to shift to areas of increasing marginal productivity (Shazali and Ahmed 1999; Sulieman and Elagib 2012).
This area is characterised by extensive grasslands that have been maintained for centuries by agriculture and are now threatened by tree and shrub encroachment.
In this capacity he conducted extensive negotiations for more than a decade with tribes that complained of abuses in the fur trade and encroachments of white settlers upon their land.
The most extensive probe of his record was conducted by a committee of the N.Y.C. Bar Association & in Apr., 1975, the committee declared that his transfer was "a serious threat of encroachment on the independence of the judiciary".
