The turn of the new millennium was accompanied by a particularly diverse group of burned area datasets from different sensors in the Canadian boreal forests, brought together in a year of low global fire activity. This paper provides an assessment of spatial and temporal accuracy, by means of a fire-by-fire comparison of the following: two burned area datasets obtained from SPOT-VEGETATION (VGT...

OBJECTIVE To determine the present status of plant communities and their possible association with the habitat in Malam Jabba, Swat, Pakistan. METHODS A study on the phytoecology was conducted in various ecologically important sites of Malam Jabba, Swat, Pakistan from 2002 to 2004. The altitude of these sites ranged from 1 200 m to 3 200 m. Quadrat method was used for evaluation of plants com...

There is a public perception that large high-severity wildfires decrease biodiversity and increase fire hazard by homogenizing vegetation composition and increasing the cover of mid-story vegetation. But a growing literature suggests that vegetation responses are nuanced. LiDAR technology provides a promising remote sensing tool to test hypotheses about post-fire vegetation regrowth because veg...

We present results of opinion dynamics simulations based on the emotion/information/opinion (E/I/O) model, applied to a strongly polarized society. Under certain conditions the model leads to metastable coexistence of two subcommunities (supporting each of the opinions) of comparable size – which corresponds to bipartisan split found in many real world communities. Spurred by the recent breakdo...

Vegetation indicators and spatial distribution characteristics are the core and basis to study the complex human-natural coupled system. In this paper, with Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 remote sensing data, we quantitatively estimated vegetation coverage in Henan Province, China. According to the urbanization rate, altitude, slope degree, and slope exposure, we analyzed spatial and temporal variatio...

Understanding the scattering mechanisms from the ground surface in the presence of different vegetation densities is necessary for the interpretation of P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations and for the design of geophysical retrieval algorithms. In this study, a quantitative analysis of vegetation and soil scattering mechanisms estimated from the observations of an airborne P-band...

Resilience is a fundamental concept for understanding vegetation as a dynamic component of the climate system. It expresses the ability of ecosystems to tolerate disturbances and to recover their initial state. Recovery times are basic parameters of the vegetation’s response to forcing and, therefore, are essential for describing realistic 5 vegetation within dynamical models. Healthy vegetatio...