Vegetation height is one of the leading dimensions of ecological variations among tree species and is central to ecosystem functioning [1]. Since its launch in 2003, GLAS (Geoscience Laser Altimeter System) on board ICESat (Ice, Cloud,and land Elevation Satellite) has produced unprecedented dataset at the global scale [2]. However, the challenge to retrieve canopy height from large-footprint sa...

sensors onboard meteorological satellites such as modis and avhrr are able to collect information adequate in frequency but with low spatial resolution. the problem can be overcome, if one finds a way to increase the quality of the vegetation indices through searching in each individual pixel of the images, employing concurrent higher spatial resolution images. the objective of this study was t...

The ability to measure land surface topography over large areas to assess natural hazard threats posed by seismic and flooding events is a critical, international need. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) has been used to map topography; however, accuracies are limited because observations are not measurements of true surface topography over vegetated areas. Instead, the measuremen...

This paper attempts to evaluate the positive effects of vegetation with a multi-scale approach: an urban and a building scale. Monitoring the urban heat island in four areas of New York City, we have found an average of 2 °C difference of temperatures between the most and the least vegetated areas, ascribable to the substitution of vegetation with man-made building materials. At micro-scale, we...

The ortolan bunting Emberiza hortulana is a bird species that has shown a particularly dramatic decline during recent decades within the agricultural areas of Europe. We studied the population density changes and environment associations of the ortolan bunting within agricultural landscapes in southern Finland, from territory to landscape scale, in 1984–2002. The crash of the ortolan bunting po...

This project has two main objectives; the first is to documents the effect of a porous friction course overlay on the quality of highway stormwater runoff, and the second is to assess pollutant removal of a vegetated area along the side of a road from both conventional and porous pavements. The quantity and quality of stormwater runoff from a four-lane divided highway in the Austin, Texas, area...

This study examined habitat use patterns of newly settled spotted seatrout Cynoscion nebulosus (Cuvier) across several Gulf of Mexico estuaries. Intensive sampling using an epibenthic sled was conducted in three Texas bays and among three potential habitat types. A long-term data set (1982 to 1997) from the National Marine Fisheries Service was also used to examine C. nebulosus habitat use patt...

the estimation of velocity distribution plays a major role in the hydrodynamics of vegetated streams or rivers of extensive natural floodplains. the velocity profile in vegetated channels can be divided into three zones: uniform zone which is close to bed with uniform velocity distribution, logarithmic zone which involves the main channel with no vegetive cover and the transition zone that is a...

Very high spatial resolution (VHSR) stereo-imagery-derived digital surface models (DSM) can be used to generate digital elevation models (DEM). Filtering algorithms and triangular irregular network (TIN) densification are the most common approaches. Most filter-based techniques focus on image-smoothing. We propose a new approach which makes use of integrated object-based image analysis (OBIA) t...

This study introduces a new approach to estimate surface soil moisture in vegetated areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and hyperspectral data. To achieve this, the Michigan Microwave Canopy Scattering (MIMICS) model was initially used to simulate backscatter from vegetated surfaces containing various canopy water contents, across three frequency bands (i.e., L, S, and C). Using this sim...