geographic information and analysis provide a wide range of data and techniques to monitor and manage natural resources. as an important case, in arid and semi-arid areas, water management is critical for both local governance and citizens. as a result, the estimation of water potential brought by snowmelt runoff and rainfalls seems to be very useful and important for these areas. hydrological ...

Depletion curves of the areal extent of snow cover are shown to be basic information in a snowmelt-runoff model. Originally developed in European mountain basins, the procedure is now applied to simulate the runoff in the Rocky Mountains with the use of the Landsat imagery and air temperature data. The method requires a proper assessment of the recession coefficient of discharge in a given basi...

Mountain areas are particularly sensitive to climate change. Species distribution models predict important extinctions in these areas whose magnitude will depend on a number of different factors. Here we examine the possible impact of climate change on the Rhododendron ferrugineum (alpenrose) niche in Andorra (Pyrenees). This species currently occupies 14.6 km2 of this country and relies on the...

This paper analyses an opportunity to integrate remote sensing data in a forecasting scheme of river inflow to the Krasnodar reservoir. MODIS MOD10A2 eight-day composite snow cover data was selected as the basic remote sensing information. Based on these data, a database which consists of maximal snow extent maps covering the Kuban river basin over the period from March 2000 to the present, alo...

The Asiatic ibex (Capra sibirica) is typically found in the mountains of central Asia, studies on the habitat selection of this animal are few at present. We investigated the bedding and foraging sites selection by line census in the GuRenGuoLeng areas of Central Tianshan Moutains during summer, and assess how environmental factors affect their habitat use. Our results showed that there is no s...

Dust deposition to snow can have regionally important climatic and hydrologic impacts resulting from direct reduction of surface albedo and indirectly from the initiation of snow albedo feedbacks. Modeling the radiative impacts of dust deposited in snow requires knowledge of the optical properties of both components. Here we present an inversion technique to retrieve the effective optical prope...

The endangered mountain pygmy possum is the only Australian marsupial that hibernates under snow cover. Most of its alpine habitat was burnt by a rare fire in 2003, and habitat loss and disturbance have also occurred owing to ski resort development. Here we show that there has been a rapid loss of genetic variation following habitat loss associated with resort development, but no detectable los...