Recent declines in broadleaf-dominated, early-seral forest globally as a function of intensive forest management and/or fire suppression have raised concern about the viability of populations dependent on such forest types. However, quantitative information about the strength and direction of species associations with broadleaf cover at landscape scales are rare. Uncovering such habitat relatio...

Continuous monitoring of forest cover condition is key to understanding the carbon dynamics of forest ecosystems. This paper addresses how to integrate single-year airborne LiDAR and time-series Landsat imagery to derive forest cover change information. LiDAR data were used to extract forest cover at the sub-pixel level of Landsat for a single year, and the Landtrendr algorithm was applied to L...

Accurate, current, and cost-effective fire fuel data are required by management and fire science communities for use in reducing wildland fire hazards over large areas. In this paper we present results of applying decision-tree techniques to mapping vegetation parameters (such as vegetation types and canopy structure classification) required for fire fuel characterization. Specifically, we pres...

This paper assesses the feasibility of forest cover mapping and the delineation of deforestation using Japanese Earth Resource Satellite (JERS-1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The assessment is carried out at five test sites in Germany (Thuringia), the UK (Kielder), Sweden (Remningstorp and Brattåker) and Russia (Chunsky). These temperate and boreal sites all have high forest cover, but ...

The hydrological response to land cover changes induced by human activities in arid regions has attracted increased research interest in recent decades. The study reported herein assessed the spatial and quantitative changes in surface runoff resulting from land cover change in the Al-Baha region of Saudi Arabia between 1990 and 2000 using an ArcGIS-surface runoff model and predicted land cover...

Food availability for forest birds is a function of habitat type, forest management regime, and season. In winter, it is also impacted by variations in the weather. In the current study we assessed the food preferences of wild bird populations in two types of forest (spruce and beech) during the months of November 2010 to April 2011 in the Schwäbische Alb Biodiversity Exploratory, south-western...

An increasing number of sensors are available for forest ecologists and managers seeking to map attributes of forest canopy cover, forest structure and composition, and their dynamics. This Chapter seeks to put these advances within the context of the needs of forest managers and scientists. To do so, we review the basic physics behind a variety of imagery types, discuss fundamental limitations...

In seasonally snow-covered environments, many organisms endure winter by using the subnivium, a below-snow thermally stable seasonal refugium. Because the insulation of snow is dependent on snow depth and density, the stability of temperatures within the subnivium varies across land cover types. Additionally, across much of the Northern Hemisphere snow extent, depth and duration are generally d...

Previous studies at the county level have found an increase in forest cover, urbanization, and water structures in the Black Belt counties of Alabama and have documented the connection between such increase and socioeconomic development in the region. However, such findings have limited inferences as the studies did not address the variations in demographic, socioeconomic, and land cover attrib...