The need to balance biodiversity conservation with sustainable development, though widely agreed upon, is elusive in practice. Human societies are increasingly disconnected from the ecosystems which support them. The loosening connection and growing scientific acceptance that ecosystems are complex, dynamic, non-linear systems pose new challenges for rangeland monitoring. Consequently, although...

The importance of accurately monitoring rangeland degradation dynamics over decades is increasing in Linxia rangeland, the birthplace of the Yellow River in China. Since 2000, the Chinese government has implemented the “Grain for Green” program and enforced a grazing ban in Gansu province, one of the most degraded provinces, to mitigate the problem of rangeland degradation. The effects of these...

is when per capita production and consumption grow. This may occur when more hours are spent working; but more important, for the long-term, is new technology, which leads to higher rates of extraction and/or more effi cient use of resources. For most nations, economic growth refl ects a concurrent increase in population and per capita production and consumption, all facilitated by the developm...

Conservation policy often incentivizes managers of human-impacted areas to create landscape heterogeneity to maximize biodiversity. In rangeland, patchy disturbance regimes create landscape heterogeneity (patch contrast), but outcomes of heterogeneity-based management are rarely tested for a universal response. We analyzed four habitat variables – vegetation structure, plant functional group co...

The major aim of processing satellite images is to prepare topical and effectivemaps. The selection of appropriate classification methods plays an important role. Amongvarious methods existing for image classification, artificial neural network method is ofhigh accuracy. In present study, TM images of 1987, and ETM+ images of 2000 and 2006were analyzed using artificial fuzzy ARTMAP neural netwo...