The effects of land management including sugarcane, horticultural crops (citrus, avocado and banana), forestry (gum, wattle and pine), kikuyu pasture, native forest and native grassland on the size and composition of the earthworm community on sugarcane estates in northern KwaZulu-Natal was investigated. Earthworm numbers followed the order: burnt sugarcane < trashed sugarcane = grassveld = gum...

The mechanisms driving the spatial patterns of species richness and composition are essential to the understanding of biodiversity. Numerous studies separately identify the contributions of the environment (niche process) and space (neutral process) to the species richness or composition at different scales, but few studies have investigated the contributions of both types of processes in the t...

For several decades, land use in Malinau district was dictated by the central government through the allocation of land to agriculture, timber concessions and mining companies. Now, with a policy of decentralization in place, district governments have a greater say in the allocation of land use. As a part of the district government development programs to increase district revenue, several fore...

Ambiguity between forest types on remote-sensing imagery is a major cause of errors found in accuracy assessments of forest inventorymaps. This paper presents amethodology, based on forest plot inventory, ground measurements and simulated imagery, for systematically quantifying these ambiguities in the sense of the minimum distance (MD), maximum likelihood (ML), and frequency-based (FB) classif...

Abstract. Forest plantations play an important role ecologically, contribute to carbon sequestration and support billions of dollars economic activity each year through sustainable forest management sector value chains. As the global demand for products services increases, marketplace is seeking more reliable data on plantations. Remote sensing technologies allied with machine learning, most re...

Identifying the primary causes affecting population densities and distribution of flagship species are necessary in developing sustainable management strategies for large carnivore conservation. We modeled drivers of spatial density of the common leopard (Panthera pardus) using a spatially explicit capture-recapture-Bayesian approach to understand their population dynamics in the Maputaland Con...

Experiments with potted plants and removed understories have indicated that understory vegetation often affects the chemical and microbial properties of soil. In this study, we examined the mechanism and extent of the influence of understory vegetation on the chemical and microbial properties of soil in plantation forests. The relationships between the vegetational structure (diversity for diff...

We studied avian foraging at two shaded coffee plantations in Ciales, Puerto Rico. Both coffee plantations contained patches of second-growth forest but differed in shade types; one was a rustic plantation with a species-diverse shade including many fruiting plant species and the other was a commercial polyculture shaded almost solely by Inga vera. We quantified foraging activity of five fruit-...

Identifying the factors that influence the spread of exotic species is essential for evaluating the present and future extent of plant invasions and for the development of eradication programs. We randomly established a network of 250 plots on an exotic Pinus radiata D. Don plantation on Tenerife Island in order to determine if roads and urban centers are favouring the spread of exotic plant sp...