1. Restoration of semi-arid shrub ecosystems often requires control of invasive grasses but the effects of these grass-control treatments on native and exotic forbs have not been investigated adequately to assess long-term stability. In southern California, coastal sage scrub (CSS) vegetation is one semi-arid shrub community that has been invaded extensively by both exotic grasses and exotic fo...

A grass-fire cycle in Australian tropical savannas has been postulated as driving the regional decline of the obligate-seeding conifer Callitris intratropica and other fire-sensitive components of the regional flora and fauna, due to proliferation of flammable native grasses. We tested the hypothesis that a high-biomass invasive savanna grass drives a positive feedback process where intense fir...

Many currently forested areas in the southern Appalachians were harvested in the early 1900s and cleared for agriculture or pasture, but have since been abandoned and reverted to forest (old-field succession). Land-use and land-cover changes such as these may have altered the timing and quantity of water yield (Q). We examined 80 years of streamflow and vegetation data in an experimental waters...

MODIS data is of significant for the classification of regional forest cover due to its high temporal resolution and high spectral resolution. Forest cover is an important parameter for forest ecosystem. The objective of this preliminary study is to mapping forest cover from mutli-temporal MODIS data with decision tree. The classification forest samples were selected from four global land cover...

Focusing on the complex underlying surface area in central–southern Hainan Island, this study uses Advanced Research Weather and Forecasting Model (Version 4.0) to simulate a typical mountain circulation case without obvious weather system forcing, tries reveal impacts of land cover changes circulation. One control experiment (CNTL) three sensitivity experiments, which current is taken as areas...

The forest, savanna, and grassland biomes, and the transitions between them, are expected to undergo major changes in the future due to global climate change. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) are very useful for understanding vegetation dynamics under the present climate, and for predicting its changes under future conditions. However, several DGVMs display high uncertainty in predictin...

We investigated whether fish assemblage structure in southern Appalachian streams differed with historical and contemporary forest cover. We compared fish assemblages in 2(nd)-4(th) order streams draining watersheds that had increased forest cover between 1950 and 1993 (i.e., reforesting watersheds). We sampled fish in 50 m reaches during August 2001 and calculated catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) ...

Quantification of spatial and temporal changes in forest cover is an essential component of forest monitoring programs. Due to its cloud free capability, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an ideal source of information on forest dynamics in countries with near-constant cloud-cover. However, few studies have investigated the use of SAR for forest cover estimation in landscapes with highly sparse...

In this paper, we describe the process of assessing tower footprint climatology, spatial variability of site vegetation density based on satellite image analysis, and sensor location bias in scaling up to 1 km 1 km patch. Three flat sites with different vegetation cover and surface heterogeneity were selected from AmeriFlux tower sites: the oak/grass site and the annual grassland site in a sava...

A reliable estimate of potential evapotranspiration (PET) for a forest ecosystem is critical in ecohydrologic modeling related with water supply, vegetation dynamics, and climate change and yet is a challenging task due to its complexity. Based on long-term on-site measured hydro-climatic data and predictions from earlier validated hydrologic modeling studies, this study compared different meth...