identification of rapid degradation of ecological resources requires effective environmental monitoring including ecological integrity assessment .our first aim is to analyze ecological integrity in a landscape context while developing a method to assess integrity in spite of a dearth of historical data. we used a spatial-temporal reference framework for land cover maps for assessing ecologica...

identification of rapid degradation of ecological resources requires effective environmental monitoring including ecological integrity assessment .our first aim is to analyze ecological integrity in a landscape context while developing a method to assess integrity in spite of a dearth of historical data. we used a spatial-temporal reference framework for land cover maps for assessing ecological...

Despite numerous previous studies, relationships between watershed land use and adjacent streams and rivers at various scales in Korea remain unclear. This study investigated the relationships between land uses and the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of 720 sites of streams and rivers across the country. The land uses at two spatial scales, including a 1-km buffer and the bas...

1. Despite wide recognition of the need for catchment-scale management to ensure the integrity of river ecosystems, the science and policy basis for joint management of land and water remains poorly understood. An interdisciplinary case study of a river basin in south-eastern Michigan is presented. 2. The River Raisin drains an area of 2776 km2, of which some 70% is agricultural land. The upper...

Watershed land use in suburban areas can affect stream biota through degradation of instream habitat, water quality, and riparian vegetation. By monitoring stream biotic communities in various geographic regions, we can better understand and conserve our watershed ecosystems. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between watershed land use and the integrity of benthic inve...

Estuarine ecosystems are becoming increasingly altered by the concentration of human populations near the coastline, however a robust indicator of this change is lacking. We developed an index of waterbird community integrity (IWCI) and tested its sensitivity to anthropogenic activities within 28 watersheds and associated subestuaries of Chesapeake Bay, USA. The IWCI was used as a tool to gain ...

A fundamental premise of landscape ecology is that finer-scaled local ecological integrity is directly influenced by larger-scaled land use patterns. Therefore, characterizing landscape patterns that are mapped from satellite imagery may provide valuable covariate information about average integrity “on the ground”. This conjecture was evaluated in Pennsylvania for 102 watersheds where land cov...

An important government activity of all nation states is building and maintaining a land administration system (LAS) with the primary objective of supporting an efficient and effective land market. This includes cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land, land registry systems to support simple land trading (buying, selling, mortgaging and leasing land) and land information systems to fac...

To reach its potential wildlife management needs a coherent purpose. Traditional divisions between science, society, and nature, however, create conflicts between responsibility to science, the public, and nature. These divisions emerged as early as Plato’s (400 BC) allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory human society existed inside a cave formed by its own delusions, and a philosopher or sc...