Human drivers are often proposed to be stronger than biophysical drivers in influencing ecosystem structure and function in highly urbanized areas. In residential land cover, private yards are influenced by individual homeowner preferences and actions while also experiencing large-scale human and biophysical drivers. We studied plant nitrogen (%N) and N stable isotopic composition (δ¹⁵N) in residential yards and paired native ecosystems in seven cities across the US that span major ecological biomes and climatic regions: Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St.

Energy fluxes, including net radiation, latent heat flux and sensible heat flux were determined on clear days during the vegetative period in four types of land cover: wet meadow, pasture, arable field, and an artificial concrete surface. The average net radiation ranged between 123� W� m⁻² at the concrete surface and 164� W� m⁻² at the wet meadow. The mean maximum daytime latent heat ranged between 500 and 600� W� m⁻², which corresponds to an evapotranspiration rate of about 0.2� g� m⁻²� s⁻¹ under the prevailing conditions of the wet meadow.

The habitats of aquatic organisms, including freshwater fishes (Oncorhynchus masou masou, Plecoglossus altivelis altivel, and Cyprinus carpio), fireflies (Luciola cruciata and Luciola lateralis), and frogs (Anura sp.), were evaluated dynamically in the Natori River basin in the central Miyagi prefecture in Japan using water temperature as an environmental index.

The estimation of coverage, i.e., the proportion of the total area in a study region covered by a given target class, is essential to many aspects of environmental monitoring. We analyze and compare the efficiency of different sample-based approaches for the estimation of coverage of different land cover classes from aerial imagery in a case study in Lower Saxony, Germany on the basis of the estimated standard errors.

REVEALS-based quantitative reconstruction of Holocene vegetation cover (expressed in plant functional types, PFTs) is used in the LANDCLIM project to assess the effect of human-induced land-cover change on past climate in NW Europe. Using the Czech Quaternary Pollen Database, this case study evaluates the extent to which selection of data and input parameters for the REVEALS model applications would affect reconstruction outcomes.

The Office de la Haute Vallée du Fleuve Niger (OHVN) zone in southern Mali is a small but important agricultural production region. Against a background of environmental degradation including decades of declining rainfall, soil erosion, and human pressure on forest resources, numerous farming communities stand out through the use of improved soil and water management practices that have improved agricultural and environmental conditions. Field surveys conducted in 1998-2001 indicated that environmental and agricultural conditions have improved in the past decade.

Daily tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM)-based rainfall and Landsat-derived land-cover maps were used to retrospectively simulate runoff for the Black Volta Basin. This was to ascertain the usefulness of the increasingly available satellite observation data to augment ground-measured hydrometeorological data for unguaged basins or basins with inadequate data. Both visual and statistical comparison of TRMM-based rainfall with the gauged rainfall indicates that the monthly rainfall data are statistically comparable.

Maps of continental‐scale land cover are utilized by a range of diverse users but whilst a range of products exist that describe present and recent land cover in Europe, there are currently no datasets that describe past variations over long time‐scales. User groups with an interest in past land cover include the climate modelling community, socio‐ecological historians and earth system scientists. Europe is one of the continents with the longest histories of land conversion from forest to farmland, thus understanding land cover change in this area is globally significant.

Context Today, more than 32% of amphibian species are threatened and more than 43% face a steep decline in numbers. Most species are being affected simultaneously by multiple stressors and habitat protection is often inadequate to prevent declines. Aims The main goal of the present research was to understand the consequences of alternative human land use in producing landscape disturbance for amphibians. At the same time, we also evaluated the effect of changing climatic conditions as additional potential drivers of population decline.

AIM: Deterministic niche theory predicts that increasing environmental heterogeneity increases species richness. In contrast, a recent stochastic model suggests that heterogeneity has a unimodal effect on species richness since high levels of heterogeneity reduce the effective area available per species, thereby increasing the likelihood of stochastic extinction (the ‘area–heterogeneity trade‐off’). We tested these contrasting predictions using data on bird distributions in North America. LOCATION: North America.

QUESTIONS: How does potential fire behaviour differ in grass‐invaded non‐native forests vs open grasslands? How has land cover changed from 1950–2011 along two grassland/forest ecotones in Hawaii with repeated fires? LOCATION: Non‐native forest with invasive grass understory and invasive grassland (Megathyrsus maximus) ecosystems on Oahu, Hawaii, USA.

Most work on the effects of land-cover change on tropical birds has focused on forest-interior birds because these species are assumed to be the most severely affected by forest loss. However, even species that use human-altered habitat types may be severely affected by forest loss. White-throated Robins (Turdus assimilis) frequently nest in coffee and pasture in southern Costa Rica, although several lines of evidence suggest the species could not exist solely in agricultural habitat.