Sustainable forest management integrates ecological, social, and economic objectives. To achieve the former, researchers and practitioners are modifying silvicultural practices based on concepts from successional and landscape ecology to provide a broader array of ecosystem functions than is associated with conventional approaches. One such innovation is disturbance-based management. Under this...

Wildlife is exposed to natural (e.g., food availability and quality, parasitism) and anthropogenic stressors (e.g., habitat fragmentation, toxicants). Individual variables (e.g., age, gender) affect behaviour and physiology of animals. Together, these parameters can create both great inter-individual variations in health indicators and interpretation difficulties. We investigated the relevance ...

ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. one element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...

Due to time and financial constraints indices are often used to obtain landscape-scale estimates of relative species abundance. Using two different field methods and comparing the results can help to detect possible bias or a non monotonic relationship between the index and the true abundance, providing more reliable results. We used data obtained from camera traps and feces counts to independe...

rangeland health assessment provides qualitative information on ecosystemattributes. we examined changes in rangeland health in the zagros semi-arid rangelands ofiran at fixed sites between 2001 and 2011, over the 10-year period. the rangelandfragments significantly declines in the quality of the vegetation, and changes in plantspecies were driven largely by seasonality, and to a lesser extent,...

interrupting the processes which control ecosystem resources has dramatic impacts on the rangeland conditions. to protect ecosystems and landscape, it needs to understand the ecosystem processes which regulate the ecosystem resources. as main components of ecosystems, patches and inter-patches play important roles in energy and materials cascade. ecologically, functional parameters such as stab...

Spectral vegetation indices have been used extensively INTRODUCTION to predict ecological variables, such as percent vegetation On 18 May 1980, Mount St. Helens in the State of cover, above-ground biomass, and leaf-area index. We exWashington erupted with catastrophic, landscape-scale amined the use of various vegetation indices and multiple effects (Lipman and Mullineaux, 1981). In a mere 10 l...

Landscape structure was investigated on six test sites in Switzerland, selected along a land-use intensity gradient. The test areas were captured with remote sensing images on three spatial resolutions: 1) fused Landsat ETM-IRS and 2) Quickbird satellite images as well as 3) CIR aerial photos. Segmentation and fuzzy classification were implemented on the images to extract landscape patch indice...