Cotton yield varies spatially within a field. The variability can be caused by various production inputs such as soil properties, water management, and fertilizer application. Airborne multispectral imaging is capable of providing data and information to study effects of the inputs on yield qualitatively and quantitatively in a timely and cost-effective fashion. A 10-ha cotton field with irriga...

Assessing biomass dynamics is highly critical for monitoring ecosystem balance and its response to climate change and anthropogenic activities. In this study, we introduced a direct link between Landsat vegetation spectral indices and ground/airborne LiDAR data; this integration was established to estimate the biomass dynamics over various years using multi-temporal Landsat satellite images. Ou...

Heterogeneity in urban landscapes can influence the effectiveness of mosquito-borne disease control. We used remotely sensed vegetation indices to discriminate among mosquito habitats within a densely populated urban environment in New Haven, CT. ASTER derived vegetation indices were identified for 16 sites where adult mosquitoes were trapped over the summer of 2004. Canonical correlation analy...

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is of growing concern among farmers, ranchers, and researchers in the intermountain west due to its ability to alter rangeland vegetation communities and their associated fire regimes. Quickbird multi-spectral imagery (spatial resolution 2.4 mpp) was used to detect and model cheatgrass presence in southeastern Idaho. Training sites were created using 2003 field data...

Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological and environmental balance of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the most populous metropolitan area in Canada, in the past three decades. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between landscape change and population increase patterns as well as to evaluate ecological impacts of urbanization in the GTA.Multi-temporal re...

Disturbance regimes are changing worldwide, and the consequences for ecosystem function and resilience are largely unknown. Functional diversity (FD) provides a surrogate measure of ecosystem function by capturing the range, abundance and distribution of trait values in a community. Enhanced understanding of the responses of FD to measures of vegetation structure at landscape scales is needed t...

Early studies of plant response to ozone (O3) utilized concentration-based metrics, primarily by summarizing the commonly monitored hourly average data sets. Research with the O3 concentration parameter led to the recognition that both peak concentrations and cumulative effects are important when relating plant response to O3. The US and Canada currently use O3 concentration-based (exposure-bas...

Ecology Montane Meadows in the Sierra Nevada: A comparison of terrestrial and aquatic assessment methods Abstract We surveyed montane meadows in the northern Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades for two field seasons to compare commonly used aquatic and terrestrial-based assessments of meadow condition. We surveyed 1) fish, 2) reptiles, 3) amphibians, 4) aquatic macroinvertebrates, 5) stream geo...

The goal of the research reported here is to assess the capability of satellite vegetation indices from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard both Terra and Aqua satellites, in order to replicate live fuel moisture content of Southern California chaparral ecosystems. We compared seasonal and interannual characteristics of in-situ live fuel moisture with satellite vegetation ...