land cover

The assessment of the value of ecosystem services is a valuable tool for biodiversity conservation that can facilitate better environmental policy decision-making and land management, and can help land managers develop interventions to compensate for biodiversity loss at the patch level.

Natural, protected areas offer many possibilities for recreation in rural areas such as camping, one of the most popular activities. The system established for protected areas in Turkey aims to provide a foundation for conserving areas for recreation. One such area, Abant Natural Park, is convenient for visits from Turkey’s two most populated metropolitan areas, Istanbul and Ankara.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program recently inventoried trees on 257 sample plots in the urbanized areas of Oregon and Washington. Plots were located on the standard grid (≈1 plot/2428ha) and installed with the 4-subplot footprint (≈.067ha with 4 circular subplots).

CONTEXT: The role of agricultural landscapes in biodiversity conservation is an emerging topic in a world experiencing a worrying decrease of species richness. Farm systems may either decrease or increase biological diversity, depending on land-use intensities and management.

CONTEXT: Policy decisions form a major driver of land use change, with important implications for socially and environmentally susceptible regions. It is well known that there can be major unintended consequences, especially where policies are not tailored to regionally specific contexts.

The diurnal land surface temperature (LST) variation is a primary characteristic of the effects of urbanization. However, no study to date has focused on changes in diurnal LST variation in urban environments.

Over the course of 1681 hours between May 5 and September 30, 2006, air temperatures measured at the 1.5-m height at seven sites in and near the city of Baltimore, MD were used to empirically model Δ [Formula: see text] R₋ₚ , the difference in air temperature between a site in downtown Baltimore and the six other sites.

Stream fish distributions are commonly linked to environmental disturbances affecting terrestrial landscapes. In Great Plains prairie streams, the independent and interactive effects of watershed impoundments and land cover changes remain poorly understood despite their prevalence and assumed contribution to declining stream fish diversity.

Despite many studies highlighting the widespread occurrence and effects of resource movement between ecosystems, comparatively little is known about how anthropogenic alterations to ecosystems affect the strength, direction and importance of such fluxes. Hydrological regime and riparian land use cause well-documented changes in riverine larval invertebrate communities.

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.

Relationships between seasonal climate, land cover and surface energy exchange in tropical montane cloud forest environments are poorly understood.

Protected areas, a corestone of biodiversity conservation, provide a vast array of ecosystem services to support livelihoods of people. However, protected areas, especially freshwater, are under threat with overexploitation of resources changing the land covers and degrading their capacity to supply services.