Ascertaining the relationships between sediment transport processes and vegetation cover is essential for watershed soil and water conservation. However, it is not easy to realize this target on a large scale. In this study, the location-weighted landscape contrast index (LCI) based on the “source-sink” theory of ecological processes was introduced to unravel the response of sediment yield to v...

Because of widespread habitat fragmentation, maintenance of landscape connectivity has become a major focus of conservation planning, but empirical tests of animal movement in fragmented landscapes remain scarce. We conducted a translocation experiment to test the relative permeability of three landscape elements (open habitat, shrubby secondary vegetation, and wooded corridors) to movement by ...

Human activities, particularly agriculture, have transformed much of the world's terrestrial environment. Within these anthropogenic landscapes, a variety of relictual and semi-natural habitats exist, which we term countryside elements. The habitat value of countryside elements (hereafter termed 'elements') is increasingly recognised. We quantify the relative value of four kinds of such 'elemen...

In order to adequately model ecosystems services of the urban environment, it is necessary to accurately inventory urban vegetation abundance and spatial distribution. An object-based, methodological design for estimating urban vegetation structure within the metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona using remote sensing techniques on high-resolution (0.6m) aerial photography was derived utilizing a hybri...

1 2 The common development of vegetation and soil is a central question of plant succession. We 3 asked whether places where aerial parts of woody vegetation die and accumulate on the 4 ground (zones of destruction or 'micro-chablis') played a role in the successional 5 development of vegetation patches on tropical inselbergs and whether causes could be 6 inferred from the analysis of the organ...

In addition to patch-level attributes (i.e., area and isolation), the nature of land cover between habitat patches (the matrix) may drive colonization and extinction dynamics in fragmented landscapes. Despite a long-standing recognition of matrix effects in fragmented systems, an understanding of the relative impacts of different types of land cover on patterns and dynamics of species occurrenc...

Question: How do interactions between rocky landscape features and fire regime influence vegetation dynamics? Location: Continental Eastern USA. Methods: We measured vegetation, disturbance and site characteristics in 40 pairs of rocky and non-rocky plots: 20 in recently burned stands, and 20 in stands with no evidence of recent fire (‘unburned’ stands). Two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was...

Avian species persistence in a forest patch is strongly related to the degree of isolation and size of a forest patch and the vegetation structure within a patch and its matrix are important predictors of bird habitat suitability. A combination of space-borne optical (Landsat), ALOS-PALSAR (radar), and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data was used for assessing variation in forest ...

We introduce a model of traveling agents (e.g. frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that the survival probability of a seed increases with the distance to the parent patch and decreases with the size of the colonized patch. In turn, the foraging agents u...