introduction conservation and management of landscapes and beautiful sceneries is one of the necessities of establishing and maintaining the protected areas. analysis of landscape visual quality has an important place in landscape planning and designing. in this way, reviewing effective criteria and discovering the simple patterns which affect the landscapes is the most important step of modeli...

In a series of engaging observations on colonialism and territorial conquest, Edward Said crafted the notion of “imaginative geography” to describe the ideological impulses of dominant groups seeking control of places and people.1 According to Said, imagined geography is a process initiated by groups with territorial ambitions who reinvent meanings about the landscapes they covet, and frame dis...

in today’s world the concept of “city” without effective landscape is out of imagination. being focal points for human life and activities, cities have to consider the structure and functions which are influenced by natural systems. in this regard, landscapes are inevitable parts of cities with an essential metabolic role. unlike most countries which don’t have to deal with water shortage as a ...

The importance of landscape heterogeneity to biodiversity may depend on the size of the geographic range of species, which in turn can reflect species traits (such as habitat generalization) and the effects of historical and contemporary land covers. We used nationwide bird survey data from Japan, where heterogeneous landscapes predominate, to test the hypothesis that wide-ranging species are p...

The paper introduces the landscape assessment approach for the post-mining landscapes in the Estonian oil shale open-cast mines. Typologies of mining landscapes are based on landscape pattern, features and functions predetermined by mining technologies. The open-cast mines which have been predominantly subjected to monofunctional reforestation should direct to diversification of landscape and i...

We generalize the degree-organizational view of real-world networks with broad degree distributions in a landscape analog with mountains (high-degree nodes) and valleys (low-degree nodes). For example, correlated degrees between adjacent nodes correspond to smooth landscapes (social networks), hierarchical networks to one-mountain landscapes (the Internet), and degree-disassortative networks wi...

A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the performance of evolutionary algorithms. Much biological theory in this area is based on Ronald Fisher's work, who used Euclidean geometry to study the relation be...

The 'new view' of proteins sees protein reactions as parallel processes occurring along funnelled energy landscapes. These landscapes are generally not smooth, but are superimposed by hills and valleys of different heights and widths leading to roughness on the energy surface. In the present paper, we describe the origins of protein energy landscape roughness, measurements of its scale and its ...