Solar radiation directly and indirectly drives a variety of ecosystem processes. Our aim was to evaluate how tree canopy architecture affects near-ground, incoming solar radiation along gradients of increasing tree cover, referred to as the grassland–forest continuum. We evaluated a common type of canopy architecture: tall trees that generally have their lowest level of foliage high above, rath...

this study was carried out to investigate the effect of crown canopy of ziziphus spina-christi on seed bank characteristics (density and similarity with above ground flora) in two sites with saline-alkaline and alkaline soils. in each soil, forty plots were established, half in and half outside of z. spina-christi cover. in each plot, soil sampling was done from 0-5 and 5-10 cm depths. paired a...

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of ecological factors on distribution, presence and absence of species Ferula ovina and F. persica in the semi-arid rangelands of Zanjan province, Iran in 2015. The locations of ten 4m2 plots with 15m spacing on three 150 m long transects were systematically randomized and determined in each key area within each hab...

The spatially explicit and mechanistic model TREEGRASS was used to test the effects of tree density, tree spatial distribution, and tree size distribution on radiation absorption, net primary production (NPP), and, water fluxes for a West African savanna . The model has previously been shown to adequately predict radiation absorption, production, and soil water balance in humid savannas . Using...

Hierarchical Bayesian models often capture distributions over a very large number of distinct atoms. The need for these models arises when organizing huge amount of unsupervised data, for instance, features extracted using deep convnets that can be exploited to organize abundant unlabeled images. Inference for hierarchical Bayesian models in such cases can be rather nontrivial, leading to appro...

Estimates of canopy height (H) and fractional canopy cover (FC) derived from lidar data collected during leaf-on and leaf-off conditions are compared with field measurements from 80 forested riparian buffer plots. The purpose is to determine if existing lidar data flown in leaf-off conditions for applications such as terrain mapping can effectively estimate forested riparian buffer H and FC wit...

Canopy-forming shrubs are reported to be increasing at sites around the circumpolar Arctic. Our results indicate expansion in canopy cover and height of willows on Herschel Island located at 70 degrees north on the western Arctic coast of the Yukon Territory. We examined historic photographs, repeated vegetation surveys, and conducted monitoring of long-term plots and found evidence of increase...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Grazing levels and rotational schemes need to be tailored to each individual farm or pasture, and more studies are needed on the resilience of rangelands and on separating the effects of grazing and climate. The direct short-term impact of three rates of stocking (4, 8 and 16 Small Stock Units-SSU/ha) was ...

This study investigates the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to measure and monitor structural properties of forests. Two remote sensing techniques, airborne laser scanning (ALS) and structure from motion (SfM) were tested to capture three-dimensional structural information from a small multi-rotor UAV platform. A case study is presented through the analysis of data collected from a...