The Community Land Model (CLM3) Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLMDGVM) is used diagnostically to identify land and atmospheric model biases that lead to biases in the simulated vegetation. The CLM-DGVM driven with observed atmospheric data (offline simulation) underestimates global forest cover, overestimates grasslands, and underestimates global net primary production. These results are con...

A survey was conducted to determine the density and species composition of viable seeds buried in four stands of a tropical montane forest at Parque Estadual Intervales, Brazil. The objective was to understand: (1) how numbers and composition of the soil seed bank change as the forest regrows, and (2) how such changes affect the species available for regeneration if forests of different ages ar...

Urbanization-associated land use and land cover (LULC) changes lead to modifications of surface microclimatic and hydrological conditions, including the formation of urban heat islands and changes in surface runoff pattern. The goal of the paper is to investigate the changes of biophysical variables due to urbanization induced LULC changes in Indianapolis, USA, from 2001 to 2006. The biophysica...

Knowledge and understanding of bat habitat associations and the responses of bats to forest management are critical for effective bat conservation and management. Few studies have been conducted on bat habitat use in the southeast, despite the high number of endangered and sensitive species in the region. Our objective was to identify important local, stand, and landscape factors influencing ba...

The wetland classification from remotely sensed data is usually difficult due to the extensive seasonal vegetation dynamics and hydrological fluctuation. This study presents a random forest classification approach for the retrieval of the wetland landcover in the arid regions by fusing the Pléiade-1B data with multi-date Landsat-8 data. The segmentation of the Pléiade-1B multispectral image dat...

Extraction of vegetation is an important step for agricultural, forest and greenery mapping. The proposed method examines the complex process of land cover vegetation pattern classification using an IRS-1C LISS III image. Pre-processing was done by employing partial differential equation (PDE). Normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) was applied to separate vegetation features from the ...

In the southeastern USA, land use history, forest management and natural geomorphic features have created heterogeneous fuel loads. This apparent temporal and spatial variation in fuel loads make it difficult to reliably assess potential fire behavior from remotely sensed canopy variables to determine risk and to prescribe treatments. We examined this variation by exploring the relationships be...

Rich Mesic Forest, a Northeastern variant of the species-rich Mixed Mesophytic Forest association of eastern North America, is an Acer saccharumdominated forest type typically associated with calcareous bedrock and nutrient-rich, mull soils. Rich Mesic Forest (RMF) is a priority for conservation in the Northeast due to its limited areal extent, high plant species richness, and numerous rare tax...

Considering a forest cover (Balsam Fir with various densities) we analyze the sensitivity of several vegetation indices to ozone absorption using physical simulations in the spectral bands of MODIS, VEGETATION and AVHRR sensors. Except for the EVI, MSR and GARI, the results indicate that all the vegetation indices used in this study normalize the ozone absorption in particular TSARVI and GEMI. ...