Fire is a primary mode of natural disturbance in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Increased fuel loads following fire suppression and the occurrence of several large and severe fires have led to the perception that in many areas there is a greatly increased risk of high-severity fire compared with presettlement forests. To reconstruct the variability of the fire regime in the Siskiyou Moun...

In 1998, we measured the effects of Hurricane Georges after it passed over long-term research sites in Puerto Rican dry forest. Our primary objectives were to quantify hurricane effects on forest structure, to compare effects in a large tract of forest versus a series of nearby forest fragments, to evaluate short-term response to hurricane disturbance in terms of mortality and sprouting, and to...

BACKGROUND Severe canopy-removing disturbances are native to many temperate forests and radically alter stand structure, but biotic legacies (surviving elements or patterns) can lend continuity to ecosystem function after such events. Poorly understood is the degree to which the structural complexity of an old-growth forest carries over to the next stand. We asked how pre-disturbance spatial pa...

Characterizing patterns and drivers of dispersal is fundamental to our understanding animal ecology ultimately informing species conservation management strategies. In this study, we used microsatellite data from 3941 individual black bears Ursus americanus occupying 73 spatially distinct sampling areas across a large heterogeneous landscape characterize via gene flow directionality. We fit spa...

Despite the great success of recent facial landmarks localization approaches, the presence of occlusions significantly degrades the performance of the systems. However, very few works have addressed this problem explicitly due to the high diversity of occlusion in real world. In this paper, we address the face mask reasoning and facial landmarks localization in an unified Structured Decision Fo...

Increasing the density of natural reserves in the forest landscape may provide conservation benefits for biodiversity within and beyond reserve borders. We used 2 French data sets on saproxylic beetles and landscape cover of forest reserves (LCFR) to test this hypothesis: national standardized data derived from 252 assessment plots in managed and reserve stands in 9 lowland and 5 highland fores...

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is one of the most critical parameters in monitoring vegetation status. Comprehensive assessment of the FVC products is critical for their improvement and use in land surface models. This study investigates the performances of two major long time serial FVC products: GEOV1 and Australian MODIS. The spatial and temporal consistencies of these products were compa...

We present a systematic treatment of alignment distance and local similarity algorithms on trees and forests. We build upon the tree alignment algorithm for ordered trees given by Jiang et. al (1995) and extend it to calculate local forest alignments, which is essential for finding local similar regions in RNA secondary structures. The time complexity of our algorithm is O(|F(1)| |F(2) deg(F(1)...

Agriculture production linked to population growth is one of the main motors of forest degradation in the World. In the Union of the Comoros, deforestation is particularly attributed to slash-and-burn farming as well as cultures in the forest and other uses of the forest such as charcoal production. In recent times, very few statistic and cartographic information is known concerning the spatiot...

Nurse crops of widely spaced pioneer trees are a silvicultural approach to protect the regeneration of frost sensitive target tree species. If overstorey nurse crops are harvested, they can provide additional short-term benefits through increased biomass production, e.g., for bioenergy. However, the intensification of biomass exports from forests might impact negatively on ecosystem nutrient po...