The rapid decline in the extent and health of coastal salt marshes has created a need for nondestructive methods for evaluating the condition of salt marsh ecosystems. This paper describes simultaneous uses of field sampling and remote sensing approaches to understand salt marsh ecosystem functions and species distributions and discusses the implications for salt marsh monitoring using remote s...

Vegetation clutter is a limiting factor for bats that forage near ground level, and may determine the distribution of species and guilds. However, many studies that evaluated the effects of vegetation clutter on bats have used qualitative descriptions rather than direct measurements of vegetation density. Moreover, few studies have evaluated the effect of vegetation clutter on a regional scale....

An understanding of how habitat structure influences physical environmental processes that are important to organisms utilizing the habitat is a necessary basis for predicting biological responses to habitat variation. Seagrass meadows represent an important coastal nursery habitat that modifies the local flow environment. We used basic fluid-dynamic balances to construct a simple model of the ...

the purpose of this study was to investigate vegetation dynamics and range conditions considering the climatic conditions and soil properties in doolat gharin in the south of isfahan province of an area equal to 25 square kilometer. for this purpose, after determining vegetation types and associated species, the type of rangeland utilization, grazing season, the type of livestock and other rele...

Humans are rapidly altering natural systems, leading to changes in the distribution and abundance of species. However, so many changes are occurring simultaneously (e.g., climate change, habitat fragmentation) that it is difficult to determine the cause of population fluctuations from correlational studies. We used a manipulative field experiment to determine whether forest canopy cover directl...

In most habitats, vegetation provides the main structure of the environment. This complexity can facilitate biodiversity and ecosystem services. Therefore, measures of vegetation structure can serve as indicators in ecosystem management. However, many structural measures are laborious and require expert knowledge. Here, we used consistent and convenient measures to assess vegetation structure o...

One of the primary interests of the Earth Observing System (EOS) program is to study the role of terrestrial vegetation in large-scale global processes with the goal of understanding how the Earth functions as a system. This requires an understanding of the global distribution of vegetation types as well as their biophysical and structural properties and spatial/temporal variations. Vegetation ...

Many algorithms have been developed for the remote estimation of vegetation fraction in terms of combinations of spectral bands, derivatives of reflectance spectra, neural networks, inversion of radiative transfer models, and several multi-spectral statistical approaches. The most widespread type of algorithm used is the mathematical combination of visible and near-infrared reflectance, in the ...

[1] Soil moisture is the environmental variable synthesizing the effect of climate, soil, and vegetation on the dynamics of water-limited ecosystems. Unlike abiotic factors (e.g., soil texture and rainfall regime), the control exerted by vegetation composition and structure on soil moisture variability remains poorly understood. A number of field studies in dryland landscapes have found higher ...

We used a predictive model to map canopy cover of vegetation over seven feet in height (“tall woody vegetation”) at 30-meter resolution over nearly 29 million acres within and adjacent to the range of the greater sage-grouse in Oregon (Figure 1). Texture measures computed at various resolutions from colorinfrared aerial photography provided the main source of predictor data used to produce the ...