Arctic ecosystems are characterized by a broad range of plant functional types that are highly heterogeneous at small (~1-2 m) spatial scales. Climatic changes can impact vegetation distribution directly, and also indirectly via impacts on disturbance regimes. Consequent changes in vegetation structure and function have implications for surface energy dynamics that may alter permafrost thermal ...

Shrubs are the largest plant life form in tundra ecosystems; therefore, any changes in the abundance of shrubs will feedback to influence biodiversity, ecosystem function, and climate. The snow-shrub hypothesis asserts that shrub canopies trap snow and insulate soils in winter, increasing the rates of nutrient cycling to create a positive feedback to shrub expansion. However, previous work has ...

The hydrological recovery of watersheds from disturbances such as ®re and harvest can change the magnitude and distribution of ̄ow paths as the canopy regenerates. The spatial distribution of net water input to the soil±topography system is mediated by vegetation patterns through the processes of interception, evapotranspiration and snowmelt. We have previously described RHESSys, a distributed ...

Water erosion causes severe soil damage in northern forests of Iran which is associated with different rut depths in skid trails. The aim of this study was to assess rutting and soil displacement on skid trails to mitigate water erosion. Therefore the research was carried out in eight parcels of district No 3 of Shafarood Forest in the North of Iran. In order to evaluate the amount of erosion i...

Tree recruitment is a key process underlying stand dynamics and sustainability in managed forests. Woody plant cover is known to affect the regeneration success of Pinus nigra, suggesting the existence of facilitative plant-plant interactions. The regeneration patterns of this Mediterranean pine were analyzed across its distribution area, using data from 3226 plots of the Spanish National Fores...

Increasingly, habitat fragmentation caused by agricultural and human development has forced Sumatran elephants into relatively small areas, but there is little information on how elephants use these areas and thus, how habitats can be managed to sustain elephants in the future. Using a Global Positioning System (GPS) collar and a land cover map developed from TM imagery, we identified the habit...

This study develops a modelling framework for utilizing very high-resolution (VHR) aerial imagery for monitoring stocks of above-ground biomass (AGB) in a tropical forest in Southeast Asia. Three different texture-based methods (grey level co-occurrence metric (GLCM), Gabor wavelets and Fourier-based textural ordination (FOTO)) were used in conjunction with two different machine learning (ML)-b...

Many studies have been conducted to demonstrate the ability of hyperspectral data to discriminate plant dominant species. Most of them have employed the use of empirically based techniques, which are site specific, requires some initial training based on characteristics of known leaf and/or canopy spectra and therefore may not be extendable to operational use or adapted to changing or unknown l...