Amounts of organic carbon in the mineral soil (SOC) and fine-root (

The bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) fern is environmentally significant due to its great abundance and swift colonisation, and its perception as a problem plant in degrading agricultural or ecologically sensitive land. Various attempts have been made to map bracken using remote sensing, but these have proved relatively unsuccessful, often apparently constrained by the lack of spatial detail associated with medium spatial resolution satellite sensors such as the Landsat series. In this study, bracken was characterised using a combination of 30m Landsat sensor imagery and 4m IKONOS imagery.

The Brook Trout Salvelinus fontinalis is an important species of conservation concern in the eastern USA. We developed a model to predict Brook Trout population status within individual stream reaches throughout the species’ native range in the eastern USA. We utilized hierarchical logistic regression with Bayesian estimation to predict Brook Trout occurrence probability, and we allowed slopes and intercepts to vary among ecological drainage units (EDUs).

Balancing the number of grazing animals with the level of plant resources is a core issue in grazing management. Complete, full-coverage vegetation surveys are often used for this purpose, but these are expensive undertakings. We have presented a method to downscale information from regional sampling surveys by poststratification using a land cover map derived from satellite-based measures of reflectance values. This approach opens new prospects for landscape-level evaluation of productivity.

Soil moisture is an important hydrologic variable of great consequence in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to accurately assess the spatial and temporal variability of surface soil moisture using conventional, point measurement techniques. Remote sensing has the potential to provide areal estimates of soil moisture at a variety of spatial scales. This investigation evaluates the use of European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-2) C-band, VV polarization, synthetic aperture radar data for regional estimates of surface soil moisture.

In this study, the Surface Energy Balance Algorithms for Land (SEBAL) model and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products from Terra satellite were combined with meteorological data to estimate evapotranspiration (ET) over the Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. Land cover/land use was classified by using a recursive partitioning and regression tree with MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series data, which were reconstructed based on the Savitzky-Golay filtering approach.

Urbanization can alter nutrient cycling. This research evaluated how urbanization affected nutrient dynamics in the subtropics. We established 17–0.04 ha plots in five different land cover types—slash pine (Pinus elliottii) plantations (n = 3), rural natural pine forests (n = 3), rural natural oak forests (n = 4), urban pine forests (n = 3) and urban oak forests (n = 4) in the Florida panhandle, a subtropical region that has experienced rapid urbanization.

The commonly used discretization approaches for distributed hydrological models can be broadly categorized into four types, based on the nature of the discrete components: Regular Mesh, Triangular Irregular Networks (TINs), Representative Elementary Watershed (REWs) and Hydrologic Response Units (HRUs). In this paper, a new discretization approach for landforms that have similar hydrologic properties is developed and discussed here for the Integrated Hydrologic Model (IHM), a combining simulation of surface and groundwater processes, accounting for the interaction between the systems.

Land cover composition is a valuable indicator of the ecological performance of a city. Single-family housing areas constitute a substantial part of most cities and may as such play an important role for sustainable urban development. From aerial photos we performed detailed GIS-based mapping of land cover in three detached single-family housing areas in Denmark of different urban form but comparable housing densities (ranging from 10.0 to 11.3 houses per hectare). The findings were subjected to statistical analysis and landscape metrics.

Considering the potential of shaded coffee plantations mixed with natural vegetation for promoting biodiversity conservation, this project assessed the utility of multi-date Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite imagery for the characterization of natural vegetation versus coffee plantations in western El Salvador. For assembling a multi-temporal Landsat TM data set, we applied a regression analysis model to remove cloud cover and cloud shadows. Then, through a hybrid classification approach, a nine-class land use/land cover (LULC) map was generated.

A Compound Specific Stable Isotope (CSSI) sediment tracing approach is evaluated for the first time in an agricultural catchment setting against established geochemical fingerprinting techniques. The work demonstrates that novel CSSI techniques have the potential to provide important support for soil resource management policies and inform sediment risk assessment for the protection of aquatic habitats and water resources.

A species distribution combines the resources and climatic tolerances that allow an individual or population to persist. As these conditions change, one mechanism to maintain favorable resources is for an organism to shift its range. Much of the research examining range shifts has focused on dynamic distribution boundaries wheras the role of species breeding habitat or migration strategies on shift tendencies has received less attention.