Urbanisation currently threatens over one-third of the world’s known amphibian species. The main threats of urbanisation to amphibian populations are habitat loss, habitat fragmentation and isolation, and degradation of habitat quality. A complex array of interacting biotic and abiotic factors impact amphibians in urban and urbanising landscapes. These can lead to a decrease in species richness...

The concept of landscape in contemporary cities is in a dynamic state of flux (Daidalos, 1999; Waldheim, 2006), yet urban design and planning tends to see landscapes as merely open space for recreation and areas set aside as nature reserves or urban public space (Vienna STEP05, 2005; Sydney Metropolitan Strategy, 2004). Such a reading is superficial and ignores the rich and complex contribution...

Current literature on restorative environments generally shows the importance of urban natural landscapes in increasing perceived restorativeness of urban environments. However, little is known about the positive role of visual characteristics of urban natural landscapes in increasing Perceived Restorative Potential (PRP) of urban environments. This study aimed to understand the role of four pr...

The depiction and navigation of large-scale urban landscapes are limited by the great cost of traditional computer-aided design (CAD) models for large urban environment in terms of both the labor of data entry and the runtime computational expense. This article presents a hybrid modeling approach that enables rapid urban model production from legacy spatial data. Our scheme fills the gap betwee...

Thermokarst is the process whereby the thawing of ice-rich permafrost ground causes land subsidence, resulting in development of distinctive landforms. Accelerated thermokarst due to climate change will damage infrastructure, but also impact hydrology, ecology and biogeochemistry. Here, we present a circumpolar assessment of the distribution of thermokarst landscapes, defined as landscapes comp...

Invasive species are often favoured in fragmented, highly-modified, human-dominated landscapes such as urban areas. Because successful invasive urban adapters can occupy habitat that is quite different from that in their original range, effective management programmes for invasive species in urban areas require an understanding of distribution, habitat and resource requirements at a local scale...

Natural image understanding is a very active and promising research domain both in psychology for visual perception modelling and in computer science for image retrieval. In this study, we investigate the eciency of orientation distributions over the whole image in the scale space. The global distribution of the local dominant orientations (LDO) appears to be a powerful feature for discriminat...

Рецензируемые научные журналы МГОУ. Журналы МГОУ входящие в перечень ВАК: География, История, Международные отношения, Политология, Лингвистика, Педагогика, Психология, Филология, Физика-математика, Философия, Экономика, Юриспруденция

Describing and quantifying the spatial heterogeneity of land cover in urban systems is crucial for developing an ecological understanding of cities. This paper presents a new approach to quantifying the fine-scale heterogeneity in urban landscapes that capitalizes on the strengths of two commonly used approaches—visual interpretation and object-based image analysis. This new approach integrates...

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing smal...