One of the characteristics in Iranian Model of Desertification Potential Assessment (IMDPA) is vegetation. Sincevegetation is very important factor in the degradation of land, so some indices were determined for this item in order toevaluate desertification potential of arid, semi arid and arid sub humid areas of Iran. The indices included vegetationcondition, exploit and revegetation. To calib...

Land use can be defined as the values that humans obtain from landscapes. What is it that people are actually doing on the landscape? Though remote sensing is often used for mapping land use and land cover over large areas, to actually map land use usually requires some careful human interpretation of the imagery or, better, surveying or interviewing people on the ground to identify their use o...

  Application of gepraphic information system and image processing in evaluation of surface runoff of a watershed in recent years has increased greatly. In the study , the runoff curve number map was prepared using geographic information system (GIS)and Landsat Sattelite Images (ETM+)for two watersheds of Mansourabad in southern Khorasan province and Navroud in Gilan province based on the facto...

Land use change modifies the environment at multiple spatial scales, and is a main driver of species declines and deterioration of ecosystem services. However, most of the research on the effects of land use change has focused on taxonomic diversity, while functional diversity, an important predictor of ecosystem services, is often neglected. We explored how local and landscape scale characteri...

The conservation value of natural vegetation is degraded by proximity to anthropogenic land uses. Previous global assessments focused primarily on the amount of land protected or converted to anthropogenic uses, and on forest vegetation. Comparative assessments of extant vegetation in terms of proximity to anthropogenic land uses are needed to better inform conservation planning. We conducted a...

Arid environment is a dry landscape or region that received an extremely low amount of precipitation. Arid areas are located where vegetation cover is sparse to almost nonexistent. Almost one third of earth land surface is arid or desert. Over desert areas, a number of land cover patterns can be observed. One example is given here for the Arabian Peninsula. The located area can be found in Fig....

Data on the effect of vegetation and land use type on soil organic carbon (SOC) distribution in particle-size and density fractions in the subtropical forest region in China will improve our understanding of the C sequestration potential of those different vegetation-land use types. We quantified SOC in particle size (coarse, medium and fine) and density fractions (light and heavy) under four t...