For several decades, many grassland bird species have been declining in abundance throughout the Midwest and Great Plains regions of the United States, possibly due to loss of natural grassland habitat and increasing urbanization. I used 20 years of data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey to identify increasing, decreasing, and stable populations of 36 grassland-nesting bird species. ...

Land degradation has expanded in the Mediterranean region as a result of a variety of factors, including economic and population growth, land-use changes and climate variations. The level of land vulnerability to degradation and its growth over time are distributed heterogeneously over space, concentrating on landscapes exposed to high human pressure. The present study investigates the level of...

Pine needle scale, Chionaspis pinifoliae (Fitch), is a pest of many species of conifers in urban habitats and Christmas tree farms. We found that the scale was abundant in impoverished habitats, such as ornamental landscapes, and scarce in more natural, park-like habitats. Rates of parasitism were highest in impoverished habitats, suggesting that parasitoids were not effective in suppressing sc...

Globalization and subsequent opening up of Indian markets has given impetus to the urbanization process in most urban pockets in India leading to large scale irreversible land cover changes. Tier II cities in Karnataka with spurt in urban activities are trying to be infrastructural competitive. However this approach has marginalized the planned interventions through the understanding and visual...

While URGE, GreenKeys, and SWITCH are already completed, CyberParks is in its initial steps. The projects URGE and GreenKeys focus on green landscapes. In URGE, a set of criteria was created to assess urban green spaces, and thus increase their potential for improving the quality of life in cities. GreenKeys addressed the creation and adoption of green space strategies as a shared vision toward...

Urban ecosystem assessments increasingly rely on widely available map products, such as the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) National Land Cover Database (NLCD), and datasets that use generic classification schemes to detect and model large-scale impacts of land-cover change. However, utilizing existing map products or schemes without identifying relevant urban class types such as semi-natural, y...

There is growing recognition that developed landscapes are important systems in which to promote ecological complexity and conservation. Yet, little is known about processes regulating these novel ecosystems, or behaviours employed by species adapting to them. We evaluated the isotopic niche of an apex carnivore, the cougar (Puma concolor), over broad spatiotemporal scales and in a region chara...

Common approaches to mapping green infrastructure in urbanised landscapes invariably focus on measures of land use or land cover and associated functional or physical traits. However, such onedimensional perspectives do not accurately capture the character and complexity of the landscapes in which urban inhabitants live. The new approach presented in this paper demonstrates how open-source, hig...

In this paper, we deal with the effects of urban landscapes on land prices under uncertainty, represented by fuzzy numbers. To this end, the factors for evaluating urban landscapes are designed using fuzzy numbers. Moreover, we consider 11 factors for utilizing the approach, like as Continuity of external walls, Conformity of colors and materials, Favorable pedestrian space, Decorations and str...