The management of vegetated areas by urban planners relies on detailed and updated knowledge of their nature and distribution. Manual photo-interpretation of aerial photographs is efficient, but is time consuming. Image segmentation and object-oriented classifications provide a tool to automatically delineate and label vegetation units. Object-oriented techniques were tested with a very high-re...

this research investigates the vegetation of 4600 ha of polour semi-steppe rangelands in relation to edaphic and physiographical parameters in mazandaran province. for this purpose, 23 land units were selected from overlaying slope, aspect and elevation maps using geographic information system (gis). within each unit, 3 parallel transects with 100 m length, each containing 10 quadrates (accordi...

in this study, the environmental effects of land use changes on vegetation cover and emitted land surface temperature in two urban and non-urban areas of ardakan in yazd province, iran, were studied and compared temporally, using remote sensing technique. for this purpose, contemporary land sat satellite images in 1990 and 2002 were acquired and used. then vegetation cover maps were generated u...

This study investigates how two existing pan-tropical above-ground biomass (AGB) maps (Saatchi 2011, Baccini 2012) can be combined to derive forest ecosystem specific carbon estimates. Several data-fusion models which combine these AGB maps according to their local correlations with independent datasets such as the spectral bands of SPOT VEGETATION imagery are analyzed. Indeed these spectral ba...

Among the machine learning tools being used in recent years for environmental applications such as forestry, self-organizing maps (SOM) and the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm have been used successfully. We applied both methods for the mapping of organic carbon (Corg) in riparian forests due to their considerably high carbon storage capacity. Despite the importance of floodplains for carbon...

The southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann (Coleoptera: Scolytidae), is the most damaging forest insect pest of pines (Pinus spp.) throughout the southeastern United States. Hazard rating schemes have been developed for D. frontalis, but for these schemes to be accurate and effective, they require extensive on-site measurements of stand attributes such as host density, age, and...

The southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann (Coleoptera: Scolytidae), is themost damaging forest insect pest of pines (Pinus spp.) throughout the southeasternUnited States. Hazard rating schemes have been developed for D. frontalis, but for these schemes to be accurate and effective, they require extensive on-site measurements of stand attributes such as host density, age, and b...

Vagueness occurs often in spatial information. A concept is vague if objects exist that cannot be classified either to the concept or to its complement. Vagueness arises in the presence of borderline cases. Examples are soil maps, geological maps, forestry inventories, and vegetation maps. Soil classes, or vegetation classes are such that they cannot be defined sharply. The change from one clas...

Vegetation maps are the starting point for the design of protected areas and regional conservation plans. Accurate vegetation maps are missing for much of Amazonia, preventing the development of effective and compelling conservation strategies. Here we used a network of 160 inventories across northwestern Amazonia to evaluate the use of Landsat and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data t...