Rangeland management plan is one of the major means of management and utilization of rangelands in Iran. The formulation of these plans for the rangeland users should be studied from the ecological and socio-economic points of view. One of the main envisaged activities in almost all the management plans is the grazing system. An experiment was used to study the effects of three deferred grazing...

In Australia, remotely sensed Landsat TM data is routinely used for mapping and monitoring the change in extent of woody perennial vegetation cover providing information for conservation, land management and for modelling carbon flux and water use. For a variety of reasons including land cover definitions and sensor spectral limitations, studies have tended to focus on reporting changes in land...

Infrared surface temperatures from satellite sensors have been used to infer evaporation and soil moisture distribution over large areas. However, surface energy partitioning to latent versus sensible heat changes with surface vegetation cover and water availability. We tested a hypothesis that the relationship between surface temperature and canopy density is sensitive to seasonal changes in c...

Canopy chlorophyll content (Chl) closely relates to plant photosynthetic capacity, nitrogen status and productivity. The goal of this study is to develop remote sensing techniques for accurate estimation of canopy Chl during the entire growing season without re-parameterization of algorithms for two contrasting crop species, maize and soybean. These two crops represent different biochemical mec...

Much interest lies in long-term recovery rates of sagebrush communities after fire in the western United States, as sagebrush communities comprise millions of hectares of rangelands and are an important wildlife habitat. Little is known about postfire changes in sagebrush canopy cover over time, especially at a landscape scale. We studied postfire recovery of shrub canopy cover in sagebrush-ste...

introduction soil is one of the most valuable national resources that can be wasted by erosion phenomenon. therefore, prevention of soil erosion is universally considered. erosion is a process by which soil particles are separated from their original context and can be moved to another location. rill erosion is a kind of water erosion in which detachment and movement of soil particles can be af...

This paper evaluates the potential of a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) to characterize forest canopy fuel characteristics at plot level. Several canopy properties, namely canopy height, canopy cover, canopy base height and fuel strata gapwere estimated. Different approaches were tested to avoid the effect of canopy shadowing on canopy height estimation caused by deployment of the TLS below the...