Abstract. Rangeland vegetation dynamics encompass all processes of changes in vegetation composition and structure over time. Investigating the rangeland ecosystem dynamics makes it possible to determine the effects of climatic and management conditions on qualitative and quantitative changes of the vegetation in a specific period of time. Accordingly, data collection and measurements for evalu...

Plant-frugivore networks play a key role in the regeneration of sub-tropical forest ecosystems. However, information about the impact of habitat characteristics on plant-frugivore networks in fragmented forests is scarce. We investigated the importance of fruit abundance, fruiting plant species richness and canopy cover within habitat fragments for the structure and robustness of plant-frugivor...

this research was conducted to compare plant functional types (pft) and traits in an old-field (abandoned for 28 years) and a control site, in the baharkish rangelands, quchan, iran. in the both sites, 40 randomized quadrates were established. floristic list, frequency, canopy cover and 20 vegetative, phenological and morphological plant traits were measured for all plant species, within each q...

Hierarchical Bayesian models often capture distributions over a very large number of distinct atoms. The need for these models arises when organizing huge amount of unsupervised data, for instance, features extracted using deep convnets that can be exploited to organize abundant unlabeled images. Inference for hierarchical Bayesian models in such cases can be rather nontrivial, leading to appro...

Estimates of canopy height (H) and fractional canopy cover (FC) derived from lidar data collected during leaf-on and leaf-off conditions are compared with field measurements from 80 forested riparian buffer plots. The purpose is to determine if existing lidar data flown in leaf-off conditions for applications such as terrain mapping can effectively estimate forested riparian buffer H and FC wit...

Canopy-forming shrubs are reported to be increasing at sites around the circumpolar Arctic. Our results indicate expansion in canopy cover and height of willows on Herschel Island located at 70 degrees north on the western Arctic coast of the Yukon Territory. We examined historic photographs, repeated vegetation surveys, and conducted monitoring of long-term plots and found evidence of increase...

________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Grazing levels and rotational schemes need to be tailored to each individual farm or pasture, and more studies are needed on the resilience of rangelands and on separating the effects of grazing and climate. The direct short-term impact of three rates of stocking (4, 8 and 16 Small Stock Units-SSU/ha) was ...

This study investigates the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to measure and monitor structural properties of forests. Two remote sensing techniques, airborne laser scanning (ALS) and structure from motion (SfM) were tested to capture three-dimensional structural information from a small multi-rotor UAV platform. A case study is presented through the analysis of data collected from a...

the fish assemblage and diversity in relation to water quality of three coastal rivers sita, swarna and varahi of udupi district, karnataka, india was studied. 71 species representing 7 orders, 20 families and 41 genera were recorded from 21 sites along the three rivers. species composition varied longitudinally in relation to the environmental factors of the habitat. the downstream change in t...