Urban planning, in particular on protected landscape areas, demands an increasing role of public participation within the frame of the efficiency of sustainable planning process. The development of urban planning actions in Protected Landscape areas, as Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, should perform a methodological process that is structured over distinct sequential stages, providing the developm...

The emerging eld of text mining applies methods from data mining and exploratory data analysis to analyzing text collections and to conveying information to the user in an intuitive manner. Visual, map-like displays provide a powerful and fast medium for portraying information about large collections of text. Relationships between text items and collections, such as similarity, clusters, gaps a...

Self-organizing maps (SOM) are a powerful tool for detecting patterns in large, multi-dimensional data sets. Additional visualization techniques have been developed to support the user to gain insight into its structure. For complex data sets, even these techniques are not easily interpretable. Most of them consist of a grid where each cell contains a single value. Such a structure can be seen ...

The fusion of individualistic community ecology with the Hutchinsonian niche concept enabled a broad integration of ecological theory, spanning all the way from the niche characteristics of individual species, to the composition, structure, and dynamics of ecological communities. Landscape ecology has been variously described as the study of the structure, function, and management of large hete...

In applications such as landscape ecology, computermodeling is used to assess habitat fragmentation and its ecological implications. Maps (2-D grids) of habitat clusters or patches are analyzed to determine the number, location, and sizes of clusters. Recently, improved sequential and parallel implementations of theHoshen-Kopelman cluster identification algorithmhave beendesigned. These impleme...

Landscape Planning in Germany is based on the recently amended nature protection law. Municipalities and districts are required to draw up plans that represent the status and the future development of nature and landscape. The quality of the plans mostly depends on the quality of the gathered data and the quality of ecological evaluation methods applied. Geomatics could support the planning pro...

palynological analyses from exposed palaeolacustrine deposits located at the flanks of damavand volcano, in the central alborzmountains in northern iran, provide a broad idea of the temporal variation of vegetation according to climate changes during a rangeof limited time intervals during the quaternary period. this research reveals that the regional vegetation of the study area had been asemi...