introduction ecosystem services are the benefits that human derives from the ecosystems. these are servicessuch as goods and products (e.g., fresh water, fuel), regulation of natural processes (e.g., climate, flooding, erosion), and nonmaterial benefits (e.g., recreation, aesthetic enjoyment). many cities are located in the important ecological areas. currently 29 out of the 825 ecological zone...

Spatial heterogeneity may have differential effects on the distribution of native and nonnative plant species richness. We examined the effects of spatial heterogeneity on native and nonnative plant species richness distributions in the central part of Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA. Spatial heterogeneity around vegetation plots was characterized using landscape metrics, environmen...

Remote sensing technology has great potential for acquisition of detailed and accurate land-use information for management and planning of urban regions. However, the determination of land-use data with high geometric and thematic accuracy is generally limited by the availability of adequate remote sensing data, in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, and digital image analysis techniques....

The objective of this study is to develop a methodology to integrate multi-source remote sensing data into a homogeneous time series of land cover maps in order to carry out change detection. We developed a method to increase the comparability between land cover maps coming from panchromatic aerial photographs and SPOT XS (multi-spectral ) data by equalizing their levels of thematic content and...

A GIS approach and HJ-1B images were employed to determine the effect of landscape structure on aerosol optical depth (AOD) patterns. Landscape metrics, fractal analysis and contribution analysis were proposed to quantitatively illustrate the impact of land use on AOD patterns. The high correlation between the mean AOD and landscape metrics indicates that both the landscape composition and spat...

Geographically isolated wetlands, those entirely surrounded by uplands, provide numerous landscape-scale ecological functions, many of which are dependent on the degree to which they are hydrologically connected to nearby waters. There is a growing need for field-validated, landscape-scale approaches for classifying wetlands on the basis of their expected degree of hydrologic connectivity with ...

This paper introduces an integrative methodology that has been developed to measure temporal changes in urban morphology based on the techniques of multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA), landscape metrics, and fuzzy logic. In order to illustrate an application of the methodology, the paper uses two satellite images acquired in 1990 and 2000 for the metropolitan area of Los Angele...

Rapid urbanization, land scarcity, and accompanying ecological deterioration in China have received growing attention. In this paper, two fast-growing metropolitan regions, Greater Shanghai and Greater Hangzhou, were selected as case studies to quantify the impact of land use/land cover (LULC) change on regional ecosystem services value (ESV) at the landscape scale since the late 1970s. The res...

State of Knowledge The loss of habitat is a leading cause of the loss of biodiversity that we are seeing in what is being called the ‘sixth great extinction.’ Landscape ecology is the study of the spatial pattern of landscapes. Although the term has been used since the early 1900’s, it has only become a field of study in its own right with the technological advancement of remote sensing through...

Population genetics theory is primarily based on mathematical models in which spatial complexity and temporal variability are largely ignored. In contrast, the field of landscape genetics expressly focuses on how population genetic processes are affected by complex spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity. It is spatially explicit and relates patterns to processes by combining complex a...