The rapid urbanization of the world has significant ecological consequences that shape global biodiversity patterns. The plant communities now common in urban centers may represent new habitats with unique dynamics and the potential for highly modified ecological services. This study, joining extensive spatial and floristic data sets, examined current distribution patterns of non-native and native woody plant species in the New York metropolitan region, USA.

Urban sprawl along the Mediterranean coast is characterized by single-family houses and domestic gardens. Many new residences are secondary homes for socio-demographically diverse tourists. We explore the differences between the residence types in terms of their garden structures and plant compositions using socioeconomic and legacy attributes. Outdoor areas of 245 primary and secondary homes were investigated to determine plant compositions, land cover and household characteristics. Then, the outdoor land cover was compared between the two residence types.

Spatially organized distribution patterns of species and communities are shaped by both autogenic processes (neutral mechanism theory) and exogenous processes (niche theory). In the latter, environmental variables that are themselves spatially organized induce spatial structure in the response variables. The relative importance of these processes has not yet been investigated in urban habitats.

Greenbelts are the best-known growth management policies in Germany. As part of its regional plans, they attempt to keep undeveloped areas permanently open, thus avoiding sprawling, i.e., land consumptive forms of urban development. However, the effectiveness of such land use designations in terms of guiding and limiting urban growth has rarely been the subject of in-depth research. This is the first study to present a GIS-based analysis of the restrictiveness of greenbelt designations in Germany and their impact on urban spatial structure and land use.

In this article, we provide a synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature and state and federal policies focused on absentee landowners of forestland, rangeland, or farmland in the U.S. The synthesis indicates absentee owners, as compared to those living on the land, appear to be much more likely to live in urban areas, are less dependent financially upon the land and much more likely to own land for amenity reasons than production purposes.

We assessed bird diversity and nesting activity in 54 urban parks in the core of a highly populated East-Asian tropical city to investigate the effects of area, isolation, habitat heterogeneity, and human disturbances on avifauna. Tree density and heterogeneity were lower while isolation was greater in small than in large or medium-sized parks.

Aim This paper describes the development of novel indices of bird‐habitat preference to examine bird species’ use of habitats and their distributions relative to habitats. It assesses the implications for bird conservation regionally and the scope for biodiversity assessments generally. Location A 200 km by 400 km area of farmland with seminatural and urban areas, covering south‐eastern England. Methods Cluster analysis was used to link birds to landscapes. Cluster centroid coordinate values were processed to derive indices of bird‐habitat preference.

Countries around the world have responded to the problems associated with rapid urban growth and increasingly land-consumptive development patterns by creating a wide range of policy instruments designed to manage urban growth. Of the array of growth management techniques, urban containment policies are considered by some to be a promising approach. This paper focuses on greenbelts, the most restrictive form of urban containment policy. The long-standing greenbelt of Seoul, Republic of Korea is examined as a case study.

Rapid land use/land cover changes have taken place in many cities of Turkey. Land use and land cover changes are essential for wide range of applications. In this study, Landsat TM satellite imageries date from 1987, 1993, 2000 and 2010 were used to analyse temporal and spatial changes in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey. Zonguldak and Eregli two largest and economic important cities which have been active coal mining and iron fabric areas.

In this paper a new approach for fractal based dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral data has been proposed. The features have been generated by multiplying variogram fractal dimension value with spectral energy. Fractal dimension bears the information related to the shape or characteristic of the spectral response curves and the spectral energy bears the information related to class separation.