North, Malcolm; Stine, Peter; O’Hara, Kevin; Zielinski, William; Stephens, Scott. 2009. An ecosystem management strategy for Sierran mixed-conifer forests. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-220. Albany, CA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. 49 p. Current Sierra Nevada forest management is often focused on strategically reducing fuels without an explicit s...

Extensive studies have investigated the relationships between climate change and vegetation dynamics. However, the geographic controls on vegetation dynamics are rarely studied. In this study, the geographic controls on the trends and variation of vegetation greenness in middle and eastern Inner Mongolia, China (mid-eastern Inner Mongolia) were investigated. The SPOT VEGETATION 10-day period sy...

[1] The emerging interdisciplinary approaches of ecohydrology and hydropedology are sensitive to variation in soil-surface energy inputs, which are primarily modified by topography and woody plant canopies. Yet a synthesis of the interactive effects of these two modification types is lacking. We systematically estimated near-ground surface solar radiation inputs as modified by key attributes of...

The US Forest Service adopted the National Hierarchical Framework of Ecological Units in 1993 with the ecological landtype (ELT) and ecological landtype phase (ELTP) forming the lowest levels of the hierarchy. This study examines the potential of computer mapping ELTPs for the Hoosier National Forest (HNF) located in southern Indiana. ELTPs were sampled in 2001–2003 within four units of the HNF...

The so called long range correlation properties of DNA sequences are studied using the variance analyses of the density distribution of a single or a group of nucleotides in a model independent way. This new method which was suggested earlier has been applied to extract slope parameters that characterize the correlation properties for several intron containing and intron less DNA sequences. An ...

Distribution and abundance of plants has been correlated with a variety of complex environmental gradients. Environmental factors affect plants growth and need to be understood by ecosystem managers. This study was carried out to examine the relationships between site factors and different vascular and non-vascular plants in north of Iran. For this purpose, vegetation and soil sampling was perf...

We combined normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and digital terrain analysis to detect thermal south (defined in this paper as the warmest slope azimuth, especially for plant growth) in three mountainous landscapes of California. Two methods, respectively, defined topography-controlled thermal south as corresponding to (1) the maximum NDVI contrast between opposite topographic aspects...

A within-species trade-off between growth rates and lifespan has been observed across different taxa of trees, however, there is some uncertainty whether this trade-off also applies to shade-intolerant tree species. The main objective of this study was to investigate the relationships between radial growth, tree size and lifespan of shade-intolerant mountain pines. For 200 dead standing mountai...

Terrain attributes are commonly used to explain the spatial variability of agronomic, pedologic, and hydrologic variables. The terrain attributes studied here (elevation, slope, aspect, and curvature) are estimated readily from digital elevation models (DEMs), but questions remain about how the accuracy and sample spacing of the elevation data affect the estimated attributes. The main objective...

• Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are often used in landscape ecology to retrieve elevation or first derivative terrain attributes such as slope or aspect in the context of species distribution modelling. However, DEMderived variables are scale-dependent and, given the increasing availability of very high resolution (VHR) DEMs, their ecological relevance must be assessed for different spatial r...