We tested the hypothesis of a negative relationship between vegetation characteristics and ant species richness in a Brazilian open vegetation habitat, called candeial. We set up arboreal pitfalls to sample arboreal ants and measured the following environmental variables, which were used as surrogate of environmental heterogeneity: tree richness, tree density, tree height, circumference at the ...

The spatial distribution of individuals is a fundamental property of most species and constitutes essential information for the development of restoration and conservation strategies, especially for endangered plant species. In this paper we describe the spatial distribution of different size classes of the endangered tropical tree Guaiacum sanctum and the effect of canopy cover on spatial aggr...

The temporal variability of interception losses was measured for contrasting forest communities in the southeastern United States. Throughfall was measured simultaneously at Fort Benning in western Georgia for the five forest communities that are characteristic of the region. The measured interception losses over the study period were 22.3, 18.6, 17.7, 17.6, and 17.4% of the total precipitation...

A grass-fire cycle in Australian tropical savannas has been postulated as driving the regional decline of the obligate-seeding conifer Callitris intratropica and other fire-sensitive components of the regional flora and fauna, due to proliferation of flammable native grasses. We tested the hypothesis that a high-biomass invasive savanna grass drives a positive feedback process where intense fir...

The following study reports on the preliminary results of a novel processing technique for characterizing the three-dimensional distribution of airborne and ground-based LiDAR data for conifer and mixed deciduous forest plots. The frequency of laser returns within 1m x 1m x 1m cubes (voxels) and the plotting of percentile distributions within each column (e.g. 1m x 1m x 25m, x, y, z) may benefi...

A rapid canopy reflectance model inversion experiment was performed using multi-angle reflectance data from the NASA Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) on the Earth Observing SystemTerra satellite, with the goal of obtainingmeasures of forest fractional crown cover, mean canopy height, and aboveground woody biomass for large parts of south-eastern Arizona and southern New Mexico (N20...

In the crop breeding process, the use of data collection methods that allow reliable assessment of crop adaptation traits, faster and cheaper than those currently in use, can significantly improve resource use efficiency by reducing selection cost and can contribute to increased genetic gain through improved selection efficiency. Current methods to estimate crop growth (ground canopy cover) and...

To understand the biomass condition in the forestry areas, the detection for individual trees becomes an important topic. For forestry management, the canopy may be described with several parameters, e.g., number of stems, stand position, tree height, timber volume, canopy cover, etc. Traditional methods rely on field measurements, imagery, and radar data to derive the canopy information. Follo...

Climate change may affect ecosystems and biodiversity through the impacts of rising temperature on species' body size. In terms of physiology and genetics, the colony is the unit of selection for ants so colony size can be considered the body size of a colony. For polydomous ant species, a colony is spread across several nests. This study aims to clarify how climate change may influence an ecol...

There is less published research on ecosystems of forested rangeland in Iran. This research was conducted to investigate the forested rangeland area based on legal definition via comparison of indices species richness, diversity, and morphology of the trees and shrubs in Sabzkouh watershed, Chaharmahal Bakhtiari province, Iran. Quantitative characteristics of trees and shrubs were measured by 5...