Accurate detection of tree growth and ecosystem functioning in naturally vegetated areas is of interest to many applications, such as ecological and land degradation modelling, wildfire risk monitoring, carbon budgeting, and climate science. However, the changes are often small when compared to normal spatial and seasonal variability, or occur gradually in time. We use object-based image analys...

Grazing lands and rangelands are increasingly recognized as an important alternative to other developed land uses for sustaining ecological communities in Florida, the rest of the southeastern United States, and other regions. It is important to understand factors that in uence ecological communities on private grazing lands, especially in areas with abundant wetlands, which are often sensitiv...

Global change will likely affect savanna and forest structure and distributions, with implications for diversity within both biomes. Few studies have examined the impacts of both expected precipitation and land use changes on vegetation structure in the future, despite their likely severity. Here, we modeled tree cover in sub-Saharan Africa, as a proxy for vegetation structure and land cover ch...

The natural vegetation of Southern Brazil's coastal region includes grasslands formations that are poorly considered in conservation policy, due to the lack of knowledge about these systems. This study reports results from a regional-scale survey of coastal grasslands vegetation along a 536 km gradient on southern Brazil. We sampled 16 sites along the coastal plain with 15 plots (1 m²) per site...

The aggregation of areas is an important subproblem of the map generalization task. Especially, it is relevant for the generalization of topographic maps which contain areas of different land cover, such as settlement, water, or different kinds of vegetation. An existing approach is to apply algorithms that iteratively merge adjacent areas, taking only local measures into consideration. In cont...

Satellite-derived thermal information over urban areas offers and attractive and inexpensive method which have been utilized in diverse studies including land cover classification, energy flux interactions, and as input for models of urban surface atmosphere exchange. In this study, we utilize Landsat ETM+ imagery to analyze the dependence of energy fluxes on the urban surface properties in Yor...

habitat associations of wild sheep, alborz red sheep (ovis orientalis gemelini x ovis orientalis arkali ), in khojir and sorkheh hesar national parks were studied over three seasons (spring, autumn and winter) in 2000. the position of observed maternal groups (including ewe with lamb) and male groups (including rams, barren ewes and juveniles) were determined on topographical maps during the fi...

We tested the hypothesis of a negative relationship between vegetation characteristics and ant species richness in a Brazilian open vegetation habitat, called candeial. We set up arboreal pitfalls to sample arboreal ants and measured the following environmental variables, which were used as surrogate of environmental heterogeneity: tree richness, tree density, tree height, circumference at the ...

The impact of three vegetation management strategies on wetland treatment function and mosquito production was assessed in eight free water surface wetland test cells in southern California during 1998–1999. The effectiveness of the strategies to limit bulrush Schoenoplectus californicus culm density within the cells was also investigated. Removing accumulated emergent biomass and physically li...