This study investigates whether different intensities of organic matter removal associated with timber harvest influence decadal-scale storage of soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) in the top 1 m of mineral soil 18 years postharvest in a Pinus taeda L. forest in the Gulf Coastal Plain. We quantified forest harvest-related changes in SOC, TN, microbial biomass carbon (MBC), and ni...

Vegetation species maps are useful for forestry managements and environmental ecological study. From the forestry management, broad and conifer leaf forest should be mapped. In addition to them, land-cover mapping data with high resolution is needed as validation data sets for low resolution’s land-cover mapping results. SGLI sensor on board GCOM-C satellite, which will be launched in 2014, has...

Future climate change may significantly alter the distributions of many plant taxa. The effects of climate change may be particularly large in mountainous regions where climate can vary significantly with elevation. Understanding potential future vegetation changes in these regions requires methods that can resolve vegetation responses to climate change at fine spatial resolutions. We used LPJ,...

risk assessment of soil erosion, one of the most important land degradation problems worldwide, is very essential for land and water resources management, and development of soil conservation methods. in the present study, the temporal changes of soil erosion risk were assessed from 1987 to 2010, based on the revised universal soil loss equation (rusle) using remote sensing (rs) and geographic ...

During the past several decades, observational data have shown a faster increase in hot temperature extremes than the change in mean temperature. Increasingly high extreme temperatures are expected to affect terrestrial ecosystem function. The ecological impact of hot extremes on vegetation production, however, remains uncertain across biomes in natural climatic conditions. In this study, we in...

The fragmentation of forest ecosystems is common in the northeastern United States (Cadenasso, 1997). Many studies have focused on the biotic factors of forest edges. These have shown that edge vegetation is different compositionally and structurally from forest interior vegetation (Brothers, 1992; Luken, 1991; Matlack, 1993; 1994). Steeper climactic gradients are created when trees are removed...

Satellite-based estimates of vegetation structure capture broad-scale vegetation characteristics as well as differences in vegetation structure at plot-scales. Active remote sensing from laser altimetry and radar systems is regularly used to measure vegetation height and infer vegetation structural attributes, however, the current uncertainty of their spaceborne measurements is likely to mask a...

The origin of large areas dominated by pristine open vegetation that is in sharp contrast with surrounding dense forest within the Amazonian lowland has generally been related to past arid climates, but this is still an issue open for debate. In this paper, we characterize a large open vegetation patch over a residual megafan located in the northern Amazonia. The main goal was to investigate th...

Riparian forest vegetation is widely believed to protect riverbanks from erosion, but few studies have quantified the effect of riparian vegetation removal on rates of river channel migration. Measured historical changes in a river channel centreline, combined with mapped changes in floodplain vegetation, provide an opportunity to test how riparian vegetation cover affects the erodibility of ri...