Green roofs (with plant cover) are gaining attention in the United States as a versatile new environmental mitigation technology. Interest in data on the environmental performance of these systems is growing, particularly with respect to urban heat island mitigation and stormwater runoff control. We are deploying research stations on a diverse array of green roofs within the New York City area,...

1025 COVER False-colored electron micrograph of the rough endoplasmic reticulum (ER, light green), which consists of elongated membrane structures studded with ribosomes (dark green dots) and is adjacent to the nuclear envelope (dark green, right). The ER is the entry portal for newly synthesized membrane and secretory proteins (circular mitochondrion: ~0.49 micrometers wide). Two Reviews (page...

Plant biomass is an important factor for determining arid and semi-aridrangelands capacity. Due to the lack of proper and annual sampling of rangelands, there areno suitable data to determine biomass, range condition and proper range managementoperations. Plant biomass is one of the measurable attributes that can be assessed inrangeland studies. Since the clip and weight method is destructive a...

We appreciate the comments on our recent study (1) from Wang et al. (2). Our study showed that the start of the growing season (SOS), derived from analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), continued to advance in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) from 1982 to 2011. Wang et al. (2) agreed with this conclusion but stated that the SOS advancement rate could be overestimated after compariso...

water supply of green spaces in arid areas is a major challenge. a high percentage of green spacescreate lawns, which are high water consumer landscapes. due to the environmental, recreational andathletic values of lawns, they are considered as non-removable elements in urban green space development.this paper reviews and discusses strategies for efficient water usage in lawn areas using librar...

Organic matter and its replenishment has become a major component of soil health management programs. Many of the soil's physical, chemical, and biological properties are a function of organic matter content and quality. Adding organic matter to soil influences diverse and important biological activities. The diversity and number of free-living and plant-parasitic nematodes are altered by rotat...

Urbanization brings biophysical changes in the composition of the landscape. Such change has an impact on the thermal environment locally. The urban mosaic of land use and land cover is thus characteristically composed of local climate zones. The spatial variation in the land surface temperature across specific zone is studied for Bhopal city. The objective of the study was to understand how th...

The world is witnessing a dramatic shift of settlement pattern from rural to urban population, particularly in developing countries. The rapid Addis Ababa urbanization reflects this global phenomenon and the subsequent socio-economic and environmental impacts, are causing massive public uproar and political instability. The objective of this study was to use remotely sensed Landsat data to iden...

The remote sensing technology can extract change information of land cover quickly, and is widely used in real-time monitoring land use changing and urban expansion. According to the characteristics of land cover information identification present in high resolution remote sensing images, a new identification algorithm of land cover change information based on independent component analysis (IC...

Management of crop residues is an important consideration for reducing soil erosion and increasing soil organic carbon. Current methods of measuring residue cover are inadequate for characterizing the spatial variability of residue cover over large fields. The objectives of this research were to determine the spectral reflectance of crop residues and soils and to assess the limits of discrimina...