Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological and environmental balance of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the most populous metropolitan area in Canada, in the past three decades. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between landscape change and population increase patterns as well as to evaluate ecological impacts of urbanization in the GTA.Multi-temporal re...

Disturbance regimes are changing worldwide, and the consequences for ecosystem function and resilience are largely unknown. Functional diversity (FD) provides a surrogate measure of ecosystem function by capturing the range, abundance and distribution of trait values in a community. Enhanced understanding of the responses of FD to measures of vegetation structure at landscape scales is needed t...

Early studies of plant response to ozone (O3) utilized concentration-based metrics, primarily by summarizing the commonly monitored hourly average data sets. Research with the O3 concentration parameter led to the recognition that both peak concentrations and cumulative effects are important when relating plant response to O3. The US and Canada currently use O3 concentration-based (exposure-bas...

Ecology Montane Meadows in the Sierra Nevada: A comparison of terrestrial and aquatic assessment methods Abstract We surveyed montane meadows in the northern Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades for two field seasons to compare commonly used aquatic and terrestrial-based assessments of meadow condition. We surveyed 1) fish, 2) reptiles, 3) amphibians, 4) aquatic macroinvertebrates, 5) stream geo...

The goal of the research reported here is to assess the capability of satellite vegetation indices from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard both Terra and Aqua satellites, in order to replicate live fuel moisture content of Southern California chaparral ecosystems. We compared seasonal and interannual characteristics of in-situ live fuel moisture with satellite vegetation ...

We evaluated the initial 12 months of vegetation index product availability from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the Earth Observing System-Terra platform. Two MODIS vegetation indices (VI), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), are produced at 1-km and 500-m resolutions and 16-day compositing periods. This pape...

Drought is a major problematic phenomenon mostly for semi-arid areas of Iran. During drought periods, reduction in vegetation levels causes such problems as soil erosion, surface runoff, flood risk, etc. Therefore, the assessment of drought effects on plant covers is the most important issue. This research was conducted in 2015 using the extracted vegetation indices from Moderate Resolution Ima...