We tested the hypothesis of a negative relationship between vegetation characteristics and ant species richness in a Brazilian open vegetation habitat, called candeial. We set up arboreal pitfalls to sample arboreal ants and measured the following environmental variables, which were used as surrogate of environmental heterogeneity: tree richness, tree density, tree height, circumference at the ...

There is an increasing interest in the use of high-resolution multispectral data (acquired by small format digital air-borne imaging sensors) for large-scale vegetation mapping. Recent studies have focused on the potential of air-borne multispectral data as a means of identifying plant communities. This study is concerned with establishing a formal relationship between spatial resolution and la...

A suitable index is proposed to evaluate the natural short–medium-term recovery capability of vegetation in burnt areas. The study area covers 2450 km in western Tuscany (Province of Pisa, Italy). This region is characterized by a typical Mediterranean climate and is subject to fire damage during the dry summer season. Damage is mitigated where a natural rapid regrowth of vegetation prevents so...

A modern pollen-vegetation data set of 46 samples is presented from subantarctic Campbell Island, 600 km south of the New Zealand mainland. The sampled vegetation includes all major community types: maritime turf and grassland, sedge flushes, dwarf forest, scrub, cushion bog, tussock grassland, and high altitude graminoid turfs and tundra. Macrophyllous forbs characteristic plants of subantarct...

The exchange of chlorinated organic pollutants between air and vegetation in cold, mountain environments was investigated through the extraction of coniferous vegetation and high-volume air samples collected from the Canadian Rocky Mountains during the summers of 1999 and 2000. Concentrations of several compounds in vegetation increased as temperatures decreased, whereas atmospheric concentrati...

Vegetation distribution maps from remote sensors play an important role in urban planning, environmental protecting and related policy making. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is the most popular approach to generate vegetation maps for remote sensing imagery. However, NDVI is usually used to generate lower resolution vegetation maps, and particularly the threshold needs to be ...

[1] Synoptic monitoring of vegetation dynamics relies on satellite observations of the distinctive spectral contrast between red and near infrared reflectance that photosynthetically active green vegetation exhibits. It has long been recognized that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) suffers a rapid decrease of sensitivity at moderate-to-high densities of photosynthetic green bio...

Southern African protected areas (PAs) harbour a great diversity of animals, which represent a large potential for wildlife tourism. In this region, global change is expected to result in vegetation changes, such as bush encroachment and increases in vegetation density. However, little is known on the influence of vegetation structure on wildlife tourists' wildlife viewing experience and satisf...

Validating model simulations of vegetation-climate feedback needs information not only on changes in past vegetation types as reconstructed by palynologists, but also on other proxies such as vegetation cover. We present here a quantitative regional vegetation cover reconstruction for North China during the Holocene. The reconstruction was based on 15 high-quality lake sediment profiles selecte...