Today, environmental crisis and loss of natural resources are the principle causes of the creation of environmental management systems. The optimal management of natural resources requires the assessment and classification of ecological and environmental potentials. Using this method, the abilities and restrictions of resources can be recognized, and their future trends can be predicted. Nebka ...

Preface Research on biodiversity is essential to help the European Union and EU Member States to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity as well as reach the target of halting the loss of biodiversity in Europe by 2010. The need for coordination between researchers, the policy-makers that need research results and the organisations that fund research is reflected in the aims of the Bio...

1 Coordination and Integration 1.1 Improve coordination of stakeholders and various role-players, including civil society, food industry, public and private institutions, academia Building partnerships with various stakeholders to improve the nutritional status of South Africans is a key feature of success. One of the exemplary partnerships were formed with the milling and premix supplier indus...

We use a graph-theoretical landscape modeling approach to investigate how to identify central patches in the landscape as well as how these central patches influence (1) organism movement within the local neighborhood and (2) the dispersal of organisms beyond the local neighborhood. Organism movements were theoretically estimated based on the spatial configuration of the habitat patches in the ...

BACKGROUND The objective was to refine the standard regulatory exposure scenario used in plant protection product authorisations by developing a more realistic landscape-related GIS-based exposure assessment for terrestrial non-target arthropods. We quantified the proportion of adjacent off-target area in agricultural landscapes potentially exposed to insecticide drift from applications of the ...

In this study, we analyse how well saliency maps, which are theoretical predictions of the human viewing pattern, are correlated with human focus maps, obtained by tracking 42 observer’s eyes while freeviewing landscape photographs ranging from rural to urban environments. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient was calculated on the predicted and measured pixels’ greyscale values. A relatively h...

Spatially explicit land use / land cover (LUCC) models aim at simulating the patterns of change on the landscape. In order to simulate landscape structure, the simulation procedures of most computational LUCC models use a cellular automata to replicate the land use / cover patches. Generally, model evaluation is based on assessing the location of the simulated changes in comparison to the true ...

Understanding how anthropogenic landscape alteration affects populations of ecologically- and economically-important insect pollinators has never been more pressing. In this context, the assessment of landscape quality typically relies on spatial distribution studies, but, whether habitat-restoration techniques actually improve the health of targeted pollinator populations remains obscure. This...

Assessment of lake impairment status and identification of threats' type and source is essential for protection of intact, enhancement of modified, and restoration of impaired lakes. For regions in which large numbers of lakes occur, such assessment has usually been done for only small fractions of lakes due to resource and time limitation. This study describes a process for assessing lake impa...