Pine trees cover large portions of the Himalayan region and are considered a hazard to cultivation and agriculture as well as the environment. This is because during the summer season, dry pine needles fall from the trees and cover the forest floor. Not only is this detrimental to cultivation, and the growth of grass needed as fodder for livestock, this is also a serious cause of uncontrolled f...

Changes in climate and land use that interact synergistically to increase fire frequencies and intensities in tropical regions are predicted to drive forests to new grass-dominated stable states. To reveal the mechanisms for such a transition, we established 50 ha plots in a transitional forest in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon to different fire treatments (unburned, burned annually (B1yr) o...

A set of land-cover pattern maps for the Gunma Prefecture was produced to help understand and assess the ecological implications of regional spatial patterns. Covering a total area of approximately 6,360 square kilometers, about 77 percent of this area can be regarded as “vegetation cover”. The land cover map was derived from the supervised classification process with the combined use of TM, SP...

An experiment was performed in Northern Maine recently to evaluate the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in the measurement of soil moisture content in small area plots with varying surface cover and at various subsurface depths. Ground preparation efforts involved defining six contiguous 30 m x 30 m plots with three surface cover conditions: bare tilled soil, short grass and forest. F...

An experiment was performed in Northern Maine recently to evaluate the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in the measurement of soil moisture content in small area plots with varying surface cover and at various subsurface depths. Ground preparation efforts involved defining six contiguous 30 m x 30 m plots with three surface cover conditions: bare tilled soil, short grass and forest. F...

This research evaluates the utility and performance of a machine learning decision tree classification technique – random forests – for forest classification using remote sensing and ancillary spatial data, across a large area of heterogeneous forest ecosystems in Victoria, Australia. Random forest classification models for forest extent, type and height were trained using 786 2 km x 2 km aeria...

A framework for the identification and monitoring of forest clearcuts and their regeneration is presented. LANDSAT digital data are classified to detect clearcuts and their major regeneration components, including brush, grass, bare soil, and conifer. Historical LANDSAT digital data are used to provide a changedetection analysis of forest conditions. Area summaries of land cover are obtained fo...

Digital surface models (DSMs) are widely used in forest science to model the forest canopy. Stereo pairs of very high resolution satellite and digital aerial images are relatively new and their absolute accuracy for DSM generation is largely unknown. For an assessment of these input data two DSMs based on a WorldView-2 stereo pair and a ADS80 DSM were generated with photogrammetric instruments....