Aims : We address the following questions: 1) Which are main vegetation types that currently occur in Arid Chaco? 2) Do those differ terms of floristic composition, endemism, chorotypes and life forms? 3) Is there any spatial association between environmental heterogeneity Study area The southwestern extreme Gran Chaco, Central-Western Argentina. Methods survey was based on a dataset comprising...

Resilience is a fundamental concept for vegetation health. The increasing drought frequency and severity may pose severe threat to resilience. However, it still not clear how resilience evolving in response climate change pivotal biographical zones. Here, we examined the changes terms of leaf area index (LAI, an indicator canopy structure) gross primary productivity (GPP, carbon uptake) respond...

In recent years, a close link between vegetation change and climate change has been established. Vegetation change can be detected with remotely sensed images, especially with normalized difference vegetation index time series records. We used change vector analysis, especially change vector magnitude (CV magnitude), as an indicator to better understand vegetation change. Twenty-one layers of C...

Vegetation patterns arise from the interplay between intraspecific and interspecific biotic interactions and from different abiotic constraints and interacting driving forces and distributions. In this study, we constructed an ensemble learning model that, based on spatially distributed environmental variables, could model vegetation patterns at the local scale. The study site was an alluvial f...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most commonly adopted feature reduction techniques in remote sensing image analysis. However, it may overlook subtle but useful information if directly applied to the analysis of hyperspectral data, especially for the discrimination among different vegetation types. In order to accurately map an invasive plant species (horse tamarind, Leucaena le...

Every year, more than 50,000 wildland fires affect about 500,000ha of vegetation in southern European countries, particularly in wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). This paper presents a method to characterize and map WUIs at large scales and over large areas for wildland fire prevention in the South of France. Based on the combination of four types of building configuration and three classes of v...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Soils of mountain regions and their associated plant communities are highly diverse over short spatial scales due to the heterogeneity of geological substrates and highly dynamic geomorphic processes. The consequences of this heterogeneity for biogeochemical transfers, however, remain poorly documented. The objective of this study was to quantify the variability of soil-surf...