More than three-quarters of Mexico's coffee is grown on small plots shaded by the existing forest. Because they preserve forest cover, shade coffee farms provide vital ecological services including harboring biodiversity and preventing soil erosion. Unfortunately, tree cover in Mexico's shade coffee areas is increasingly being cleared to make way for subsistence agriculture, a direct result of the unprecedented decline of international coffee prices over the past decade.

Little is known about the habitat and ecology of suburban Barred Owls (Strix varia), a species sometimes considered the nocturnal equivalent of Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus). We compared nesting habitat of Barred Owls to that of Red-shouldered Hawks nesting in suburban and urban areas, in and near the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, to determine whether any features distinguished owl nest sites from hawk nest sites.

Human activities in many parts of the world have greatly changed the natural land cover. This study has been conducted on Pichavaram forest, south east coast of India, famous for its unique mangrove bio-diversity. The main objectives of this study were focused on monitoring land cover changes particularly for the mangrove forest in the Pichavaram area using multi-temporal Landsat images captured in the 1991, 2000, and 2009.

The wintering Great Grey Shrike Lanius excubitor was censused in Poland more than two decades ago (during the winters of 1988/89 and 1989/90). Single censuses were made during each winter on sample plots varying from 4.1 to 35.1 km² (mean: 16.4 km²). Altogether, data from 404 plots, covering in total more than 6.6 thousands km² were used for the analysis. Based on this data and environmental information gathered in GIS databases (Corine land cover ““CLC1990”” database, digital elevation model ““GTOPO30”” dataset) we modelled habitat- and spatial-related variation in shrike distribution.

The land surface models used in numerical weather forecasts and hydrological applications rely on the accuracy of land cover maps available from satellite remote sensing to simulate the energy and water balance at the surface of the Earth. While the impact of classification accuracy on land surface simulations has already been reported, little attention has been paid on the consequences of land cover map uncertainty driven by geolocation accuracy.

Freshwater lakes are known to release carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) to the atmosphere; however, the importance of lakes in global nitrous oxide (N₂O) budgets is not yet known. Further, despite the abundance of small lakes on the landscape, neither emissions of these gases nor their drivers are well described.

Sediment delivery from the Le Sueur River watershed is a major concern in the turbidity-impaired Minnesota River. As part of a broader effort to develop a sediment budget for the Le Sueur River, this study implemented a process-based watershed hydrology and upland erosion model, Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP), to simulate hydrology and sediment dynamics in several land-use/land-cover scenarios. The Geo-spatial interface for WEPP (GeoWEPP) was used to characterize upland overland flow elements based on their land use/land cover, soil, and slope profiles.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is a major indicator of the impact of climate change and human activity, particularly in the Sahel, where the land cover has changed greatly over the past 50 years. Aerial and satellite sensors have been taking images of the Earth's surface for several decades. These data have been widely used to monitor LUCC, but many questions remain concerning what type of pre-processing should be carried out on image resolutions and which methods are most appropriate for successfully mapping patterns and dynamics in both croplands and natural vegetation.

Landscape pattern is of primary interest to landscape ecologists and landscape metrics are used to quantify landscape pattern. Metrics are commonly defined and calculated on raster-based land cover maps. One metric is the contagion, existing in several versions, e.g., unconditional and conditional, used as a measure of fragmentation. However, mapped data is sometimes in vector-based format or there may be no mapped data but only a point sample. In this study a definition of contagion for such cases is investigated.

Due to the progressive forest expansion in European mountain areas triggered by agricultural abandonment, semi-natural meadows and pastures of great ecological and aesthetic value are disappearing. The aim of this study is to predict and analyse the future evolution of land use and land cover (LULC) in the Stubai Valley, Central Alps. We propose a computational Population Dynamics P system (PDP) model that incorporates the main LULC change processes like plant production, grazing, abandonment and reforestation.

The estimation of spatial patterns in surface fluxes from aircraft observations poses several challenges in the presence of heterogeneous land cover. In particular, the effects of turbulence on scalar transport and the different behaviour of passive (e.g. water vapour) versus active (e.g. temperature) scalars may lead to large uncertainties in the source area/flux- footprint estimation for sensible (H) and latent (LE) heat-flux fields.

PURPOSE: Many Mediterranean drylands are characterized by strong erosion in headwater catchments, where connectivity processes play an important role in the redistribution of water and sediments. Sediment connectivity describes the ease with which sediment can move through a catchment. The spatial and temporal characterization of connectivity patterns in a catchment enables the estimation of sediment contribution and transfer paths. Apart from topography, vegetation cover is one of the main factors driving sediment connectivity.