Direct and indirect ecological impacts of roads and their expansion are well documented: habitat degradation, ecosystem fragmentation, changes in natural drainage systems and water quality. Important landscape scale impacts concern roads about direct and indirect effects on deforestation and land use land cover change, that lead to habitat loss and fragmentation, edge effect, resources exploita...

Forest fragmentation is a primary threat to terrestrial biodiversity. We combine a parcel-level econometric model of land-use transitions with spatially-explicit landscape simulations to predict the empirical distribution of fragmentation outcomes under given market conditions and policy scenarios. Our model explains transitions between forest, agricultural, and urban uses, allowing us to model...

Spatial system dynamics (SSD) models are typically implemented by linking stock variables to raster grids while the use of object representations of human artefacts such as buildings or ownership has been limited. This limitation is addressed by this article, which demonstrates the use of object representations in SSD. The objects are parcels of land that are attributed to grassland farms. The ...

This research investigates the extent of land cover change, particularly urban sprawl, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and the nature of the resulting landscape fragmentation, particularly with regard to the Oak Ridges Moraine (ORM), an ecologically important and sensitive area for the region. Three scenes of Landsat TM imagery were acquired from July/August 1985, July/August 1995 and July 20...

large scale land use/cover changes and habitat fragmentation is a major factor in the distribution and functioning of ecosystems. for analysis the relationship between land use changes and their impacts on biodiversity, land cover and land use information is needed at different scales. the main goal of this study was to quantify the land use/ cover changes in arasbaran biosphere reserve, northw...

although studies on the relation between size and efficiency are ample, studies on the relation between size, fragmentation, and efficiency are limited. it is the purpose of this study in which a single-stage stochastic parametric approach is used. for this purpose production of wheat in iran is a good case because wheat is the core commodity of the iranian agricultural system which is dominate...