The World Bank has reported Taiwan as the most vulnerable country in terms of the percentage of exposed areas and multiplicity disaster. During the past decade, a number of natural disasters have occurred in Taiwan, especially two critical ones, i.e. Chi-Chi earthquake and Typhoon Morakot. In the first event, the earthquake was with a magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter scale and caused seriously d...

Increasing global human population and per-capita food consumption are expected to exacerbate the already massive agricultural footprint in tropical ecosystems. Madagascar is home to exceptional levels of biodiversity and is in the midst of severe land-use change, mostly driven by slash-and-burn, smallholder agriculture. Understanding the consequences of these agricultural practices for Malagas...

Spatially-explicit depictions of plant productivity over large areas are critical to monitoring landscapes in highly heterogeneous arid ecosystems. Applying radiometric change detection techniques we sought to determine whether: (1) differences between preand post-growing season spectral vegetation index values effectively identify areas of significant change in vegetation; and (2) areas of sig...

one of the characteristics in iranian model of desertification potential assessment (imdpa) is vegetation. sincevegetation is very important factor in the degradation of land, so some indices were determined for this item in order toevaluate desertification potential of arid, semi arid and arid sub humid areas of iran. the indices included vegetationcondition, exploit and revegetation. to calib...

In this study, we propose a method to accurately extract vegetation from terrestrial three-dimensional (3D) point clouds for estimating landscape index in urban areas. Extraction of vegetation in urban areas is challenging because the light returned by vegetation does not show as clear patterns as man-made objects and because urban areas may have various objects to discriminate vegetation from....