Iran has mountainous landscapes and half of its surface is occupied by highlands. Moreover, Iran is an arid country and deserts are located at lower altitudes. Most metropolitan areas are positioned in mid-altitudes between mountain and desert. Cities grow upwardly toward the highlands under pressures of urbanization and desertification. Foothill ecotones are a zone between upland mountains and...

Title of dissertation: MATRIX EFFECTS ON INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY-LEVEL RESPONSES OF BIRDS TO FOREST FRAGMENTATION IN JAMAICA Christina Marie Kennedy, Ph.D., 2009 Directed by: Associate Professor Maile C. Neel, Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture & Department of Entomology Professor William F. Fagan, Department of Biology Land cover between habitat patches (“matrix”) can impa...

The EIT Climate-KIC SATURN project deals with rural-urban territories, their landscapes and environmental challenges. land of our cities regions is fragmented prone to several challenges in terms ecology, governance social coherence. As a result unregulated overlapping different uses complex patterns, landscape fragmentation creates severe the ways perceived, identified therefore managed. conso...

Methodologies are developed and assessed for the delineation of urban areas on moderate resolution satellite images based on line feature extraction and processing. It is argued that a simple two component urban/rural road network model and a preliminary estimate of the extent of urban cover in a satellite scene can be used to quantify processing settings, such as line thresholds. As a result, ...

To further evaluate the factors influencing public heat and air-quality health, a characterization of how urban areas affect the thermal environment, particularly in terms of the air temperature, is necessary. To assist public health agencies in ranking urban areas in terms of heat stress and developing mitigation plans or allocating various resources, this study characterized urban heat in Cal...