Leaf area index (LAI) is one of the most important structural parameters in terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, multitemporal Landsat TM images covering experiment station in the northwest mountain areas of Beijing were acquired and in-situ forest LAI was measured. By correlation analysis of three vegetation indexes (NDVI, EVI and TGDVI) and LAI, it is found that the correlation between LAI ...

Nature reserves are an important component of the strategy to halt biodiversity loss caused by habitat fragmentation and loss, climate change and other anthropogenic factors. In the past decades, 184 nature reserves were designed for biodiversity conservation in Inner Mongolia. However, no studies have quantified the general condition of these reserves. In this paper, we summarized the history,...

Fire is a dominant process in boreal forest landscapes and creates a spatial patch mosaic with different burn severities and age classes. Quantifying effects of vegetation and topography on burn severity provides a scientific basis on which forest fire management plans are developed to reduce catastrophic fires. However, the relative contribution of vegetation and topography to burn severity is...

The temperate deciduous species Nothofagus glauca (Phil.) Krasser exhibits characteristics commonly found in fire-adapted vegetation, yet the role of fire in the evolutionary history of the vegetation in south-central Chile has not been well investigated. We examined the effects of a wildfire on early succession in a Nothofagus glauca forest in the Coastal Cordillera of south-central Chile by c...

BACKGROUND Managers of landscapes dedicated to forest commodity production require information about how practices influence biological diversity. Individual species and communities may be threatened if management practices truncate or simplify forest age classes that are essential for reproduction and survival. For instance, the degradation and loss of complex diverse forest in young age class...

An understanding of the processes governing natural afforestation over large spatial scales is vital for enhancing forest carbon sequestration. Models of tree species occurrence probability in non-forest vegetation could potentially identify the primary variables determining natural afforestation. However, inferring processes governing afforestation using tree species occurrence is potentially ...

Measures of forest structure provide an important indication of productivity, health and the growth stage of a forest. Using traditional field-based approaches, extraction of such structural parameters is often time consuming and labour intensive. Remote sensing is a cost effective technique for mapping and interpreting some features of vegetation; and LiDAR provides highly accurate measurement...

In this paper we operated ant collections in three inland Atlantic forest fragments and in the neighboring Edmundo Navarro de Andrade State Forest (FEENA), an Eucalyptus plantation located in Rio Claro, interior of São Paulo State. We show that the ant communities of the native forest fragments are more similar among themselves than to the ant community of FEENA. Thus we evidence that, in addit...

Information about how vegetation composition and structure vary quantitatively and spatially with physical environment, disturbance history, and land ownership is fundamental to regional conservation planning. However, current knowledge about patterns of vegetation variability across large regions that is spatially explicit (i.e., mapped) tends to be general and qualitative. We used spatial pre...