Human land use legacies have significant and long-lasting ecological impacts across landscapes. Investigating ancient (>400 years) legacy effects can be problematic due to the difficulty in detecting specific, historic land uses, especially those hidden beneath dense canopies. Caracol, the largest (~200 km2) Maya archaeological site in Belize, was abandoned ca. A.D. 900, leaving behind myriad s...

Structural parameters of mangrove forests were measured at seven geographical locations in Florida (U.S.A.), Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Costa Rica. One-tenth hectare plots were subdivided into twenty 5 x 10 m plots where all individuals greater than 2.5 cm DBH were measured and recorded. Height of the tallest tree in each plot was measured. The complexity index developed by Holdridge (1967) as an...

[1] The Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4) overestimates gross primary production (GPP) compared with data‐driven estimates and other process models. We use global, spatially gridded GPP and latent heat flux upscaled from the FLUXNET network of eddy covariance towers to evaluate and improve canopy processes in CLM4. We investigate differences in GPP and latent heat flux arising from model pa...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) provides a flexible tool to carry out genetic analyses of family and twin data. The basic model which decomposes the variance between and within families for a particular trait into genetic and non-genetic components can be generalized to multivariate and/or longitudinal data, incorporate sex differences in parameter estimates, and model the effects of measure...

Proactive management of invasive species in urban areas is critical to restricting their overall distribution. The objective of this work is to determine whether advanced remote sensing technologies can help to detect invasions effectively and efficiently in complex urban ecosystems such as parks. In Surrey, BC, Canada, Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) and English ivy (Hedera helix) are ...

The height and shape of shrub canopies are critical measurements for characterizing shrub steppe rangelands. Remote sensing technologies might provide an efficient method to acquire these measurements across large areas. This study compared point-cloud and rasterized lidar data to field-measured sagebrush height and shape to quantify the correlation between field-based and lidar-derived estimat...

This study was designed to estimate the canopy biophysical characteristics of semi-arid grassland ecosystems by using in situ field spectrometry measurements to identify important spectral information for predictions at broader spatial scales. Spectral vegetation indices (VIs), reflectance spectra, continuum removal spectra, and the amplitude of the red edge peak (drre) based on 61 well-replica...

Today, the scientific community and the space organizations are becoming increasingly interested in the use of UHF radar sensors for global observation of forested ecosystems. This interest has challenged the radio science community to develop innovative and improved approaches to problems associated with the spaceborne UHF propagation and scattering of microwaves in forest applications. In thi...

The hydrological recovery of watersheds from disturbances such as ®re and harvest can change the magnitude and distribution of ̄ow paths as the canopy regenerates. The spatial distribution of net water input to the soil±topography system is mediated by vegetation patterns through the processes of interception, evapotranspiration and snowmelt. We have previously described RHESSys, a distributed ...

environmental characteristics, including the quality of green spaces, constitute one of the determinants of buildings (house & apartment) transaction prices. in this research, impact of urban green space on building's transaction prices (rials/m2) in karaj region, district 1 (jahanshahr), was analyzed. therefore, a questionnaire concerning building characteristics and transaction prices wa...