THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author. Data processing errors have resulted in misleading conclusions. The scientific community in King Saud University has serious concerns regarding the results and the article will be res...

Effective assessment of biodiversity in cities requires detailed vegetation maps.To date, most remote sensing of urban vegetation has focused on thematically coarse landcover products. Detailed habitat maps are created by manual interpretation of aerialphotographs, but this is time consuming and costly at large scale. To address this issue, wetested the effectiveness of object-based classificat...

The spatial configuration of vegetation patches in the landscape has implications for provision ecosystem services, human adaptation to climate change, enhancement, or mitigation urban heat island. Until recently, effect enhance mitigate island received little consideration thermal assessments. This study examines impact on warming and cooling Harare metropolitan city, Zimbabwe. used Advanced S...

Redistribution of soil, nutrients, and contaminants is often driven by wind erosion in semiarid shrublands. Wind erosion depends on wind velocity (particularly during episodic, high-velocity winds) and on vegetation, which is generally sparse and spatially heterogeneous in semiarid ecosystems. Further, the vegetation cover can be rapidly and greatly altered due to disturbances, particularly fir...

In the semi-arid rangelands of north central Kenya, the abundance of grasses has declined over recent decades. Concomitantly, the native succulent herb Sansevieria volkensii has greatly proliferated in many areas. Landscape structure has thus shifted from contiguous herbaceous cover to large, dense stands of S. volkensii with interpatches of bare or sparsely vegetated ground. Local pastoralists...

A light detection and ranging canopy height model (CHM) was used as training data for a segment-based classification of woody patches. The classifier is accurate (∼92%) and suitable for use at the national scale. Height thresholds and percentage cover of vegetation from the CHM were used to produce larger quantities of reliable training data compared to other, mostly point or plot-based, ground...

Carolina bays are depression wetlands of high conservation value that occur across the Southeastern Coastal Plain of the United States. Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is one rare carnivorous plant that grows in open habitats on the rims of Carolina bays. Without frequent burning, vegetation on bay rims becomes dominated by evergreen shrubs and Venus flytrap populations decline. This project ...

Conservation programs increasingly involve the reintroduction of animals which otherwise would not recolonize restored habitats. We assessed the long-term success of a project in which the Blue-winged grasshopper, Oedipoda caerulescens (L., 1758), was reintroduced to a nature reserve in Northwestern Switzerland, an alluvial gravel area where the species went extinct in the 1960s. In summer 1995...

Arid ecosystems are characterized by high spatial heterogeneity, and the variation among vegetation patches is a clear example. Soil biotic and abiotic factors associated with these patches have also been well documented as highly heterogeneous in space. Given the low vegetation cover and little precipitation in arid ecosystems, soil microorganisms are the main drivers of nutrient cycling. None...

Topsoil is the preferred substrate for areas requiring rehabilitation after bauxite mining. However, topsoil is sometimes lacking and so there is a need to test the suitability of other, locally available substrates. In an abandoned bauxite mine in Southeastern Brazil, small patches of native vegetation spontaneously established in shallow depressions over weathered laterite, suggesting that gr...