We combined two existing datasets of vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2011, 9899; Nature Climate Change, 2, 2012, 182) into a pan-tropical AGB map at 1-km resolution using an independent reference dataset of field observations and locally calibrated high-resolution biomass maps, harmonized and upscaled to...

Habitat modification may change vertebrate and vector-borne disease distributions. However, natural forest regeneration through secondary succession may mitigate these effects. Here we tested the hypothesis that secondary succession influences the distribution of birds and their haemosporidian parasites (genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) in a seasonally dry tropical forest, a globally threate...

Environmental factors are being increasingly taken into account in the increasing development of urbanization and citizen residential requirements. Climate and climate conditions are among the environmental factors that have always influenced human welfare. Climate has always been incorporated in old urban structures in Iran and can be easily observed. Despite the importance of climate-related ...

[1] The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been widely used to study aridity changes in modern and past climates. Efforts to address its major problems have led to new variants of the PDSI, such as the self‐calibrating PDSI (sc_PDSI) and PDSI using improved formulations for potential evapotranspiration (PE), such as the Penman‐Monteith equation (PE_pm) instead of the Thornthwaite equation...

The study of southern dry forest lemurs has been largely restricted to small reserves; yet, the majority of the region's lemur populations reside outside protected areas. Lemur catta and Propithecus verreauxi occupy the same forests but have different dietary preferences. This study assessed L. catta and P. verreauxi population densities across a 3-km dry forest gradient (1,539 ha) in southern ...

The von Neumann-Mullins law for the area evolution of a cell in the plane describes how a dry foam coarsens in time. Recent theory and experiment suggest that the dynamics are different on the surface of a three-dimensional object such as a sphere. This work considers the dynamics of dry foams on the surface of a sphere. Starting from first principles, we use computer simulation to show that cu...

Several studies have identi® ed statistically signi® cant correlations between Paci® c sea surface temperature anomalies and NDVI anomalies in Southern Africa. The potential predictive value of the relationship was explored for the 1998 maize growing season. Cross-validation techniques suggested a more useful relationship for regions of wet anomaly than for regions of dry anomaly. Observed 1998...

To examine the temporal patterns in the occurrence of a tropical ichthyofauna, fisheries-independent samples were collected between September 2003 and July 2004 from intertidal mangrove creeks in the Curuçá estuary, Pará, north Brazil. Juveniles occurred year-round with the most intense occurrence during the wet/dry transition season (Anchovia clupeoides, Cetengraulis edentulus, Rhinosardinia a...

A new multispectral image classification method is presented. The method is based on dividing the Near Infrared “NIR” and Visible Red “VR” scatterplot diagram into regions corresponding to their reflectance values. The best line discriminating the Soil’s components from the vegetated area is recognized by utilizing the least square fitting criterion. The vegetate line which differentiate the fu...