Vegetation was sampled in kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides)-dominant forest fragments having different recovery periods since grazing ceased in the Waikato region, North Island, New Zealand. Changes in vegetation were modeled against recovery periods ranging from 0–74 y and in relation to position within fragment (edge or interior). Indigenous plant species richness increased and adventive p...

Increased livestock densities near artificial watering sites create disturbance gradients called piospheres. We studied responses of alien and native annual plants and native perennial plants within 9 piospheres in the Mojave Desert of North America. Absolute and proportional cover of alien annual plants increased with proximity to watering sites, whereas cover and species richness of native an...

This study used time series remote sensing data from 1973, 1990 and 2004 to assess spatial forest cover change patterns in the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR), South Western Ghats (India). Analysis of forest cover changes and its causes are the most challenging areas of landscape ecology, especially due to the absence of temporal ground data and comparable space platform based data. C...

vegetation cover over time and space is the result of interactions betweenvegetation cover and environmental factors. changes occurred in range covers are caused bymatrix dominance, one of the most important environmental factors. decision support system(dss) could be used for determining the rate and importance of each factor. actually, inmethods based on dss, relations between input and outpu...

Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether “win-win” scenarios are possible—that is, whether protected areas can both stem forest cover change and alleviate p...

Case studies of land use change have suggested that deforestation across Southern Mexico is accelerating. However, forest transition theory predicts that trajectories of change can be modified by economic factors, leading to spatial and temporal heterogeneity in rates of change that may take the form of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). This study aimed to assess the evidence regarding pot...

Savanna ecosystems are water limited and responsive to rainfall on short time scales, characteristics that can be exploited to estimate fractional cover of trees, grass, and bare soil over large-scale areas from synthesis of remote sensing and rainfall measurements. A method is presented to estimate fractional cover based upon the differing ways in which grasses and trees respond to rainfall, a...

While we know that deforestation in the tropics is increasingly driven by commercial agriculture, most tropical countries still lack recent and spatially-explicit assessments of the relative importance of pasture and cropland expansion in causing forest loss. Here we present a spatially explicit quantification of the extent to which cultivated land and grassland expanded at the expense of fores...

We estimate changes in forest cover (deforestation and forest regrowth) in the tropics for the two last decades (1990-2000 and 2000-2010) based on a sample of 4000 units of 10 ×10 km size. Forest cover is interpreted from satellite imagery at 30 × 30 m resolution. Forest cover changes are then combined with pan-tropical biomass maps to estimate carbon losses. We show that there was a gross loss...

Vegetation cover over time and space is the result of interactions betweenvegetation cover and environmental factors. Changes occurred in range covers are caused bymatrix dominance, one of the most important environmental factors. Decision support system(DSS) could be used for determining the rate and importance of each factor. Actually, inmethods based on DSS, relations between input and outpu...