Plants have undergone 470 million years of evolution on land and different groups have distinct body shapes. Liverworts are the most ancient land plant lineage and have a flattened, creeping body (the thallus), which grows from apical cells in an invaginated "notch." The genetic mechanisms regulating liverwort shape are almost totally unknown, yet they provide a blueprint for the radiation of l...

As a rule, communities consist of few abundant and many rare species, which is reflected in the characteristic shape of species abundance distributions (SADs). The processes that shape these SADs have been a longstanding problem for ecological research. Although many studies found strong negative effects of increasing land-use intensity on diversity, few reports consider land-use effects on SAD...

Although spatial measures such as texture and shape extracted from very high resolution imagery (VHR) have been successfully employed in pixel-based classifications, the effectiveness of such measures in classification mainly depends on the optimal window size in which spatial measures are calculated. However, an optimal window size is usually subjective and varies for different image and diffe...

A new approach to investigation of human influences on the environment identifies social organization as an influence independent of population size, affluence, and technology. The framework also identifies population events, such as births, that influence the environment. The authors use longitudinal, multilevel, mixed-method measures of local land use changes, population dynamics, and social ...

This study analyzed spatial and temporal changes in land use/land cover in a typical mountain watershed covering an area of 153 km2 in central Nepal by comparing classified satellite images from 1976, 1989 and 2000 coupled by GIS analyses and also investigated changes in the shape of land use patches over the period. The results show an increase in broadleaf forest, conifer forest and winter-cr...