From a previous field investigation in Yunnan, southwest China between 2001 and 2015, we selected two types of landscapes to make a retrospectively comparative study on the distribution of small mammals and their ectoparasitic chigger mites. One landscape is "mountainous uncultivated land (MUL)" with higher biodiversity, which is located in a famous "World Nature Heritage Site", the Three-Paral...

BACKGROUND Injury is the leading cause of death in teenagers worldwide. In Taiwan, people in mountainous areas have a 4 to 8 years shorter life span than the general population. Injury among teenagers is likely a major cause. The objective of this study was to investigate the regional differences in the prevalence, the risk factors, and the medical expenditures for injury among Taiwanese teenag...

Atmospheric deposition has long been recognized as an important source of pollutants and nutrients to ecosystems. The need for reliable, spatially explicit estimates of total atmospheric deposition (wet + dry + cloud) is central, not only to air pollution effects researchers, but also for calculation of input-output budgets, and to decision makers faced with the challenge of assessing the effic...

Increasing attention is being paid on leaf area index (LAI) retrieval in mountainous areas. Mountainous areas present extreme topographic variability, and are characterized by more spatial heterogeneity and inaccessibility compared with flat terrain. It is difficult to collect representative ground-truth measurements, and the validation of LAI in mountainous areas is still problematic. A cost-c...

Wetlands are very sensitive to ecosystem changes, so integrated analyses and modeling of their process dynamics as well as their interaction with other hydrologic and ecological components provide valuable information for impact assessment. However, since wetland processes are complex, research methods aiming to improve the understanding of wetland dynamics in a landscape perspective must compr...

Cultural landscapes are increasingly understood as something not merely to be protected. The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) and the European Landscape Convention (ELC) as well as the new Concepts and Strategies for Spatial Development in Germany propose considering cultural landscapes also as a force to promote cooperative regional development. Common historical roots, special ...

This article presents the use of new remote sensing data acquired from airborne full-waveform lidar systems. They are active sensors which record altimeter profiles. This paper introduces a set of methodologies for processing these data. These techniques are then applied to a particular landscape, the badlands, but the methodologies are designed to be applied to any other landscape. Indeed, the...