Desertification due to climate change and increasing drought periods is a worldwide problem for both ecology and economy. Our ability to understand how vegetation manages to survive and propagate through arid and semiarid ecosystems may be useful in the development of future strategies to prevent desertification, preserve flora-and fauna within-or even make use of scarce resources soils. In thi...

Human disturbance has disrupted the dynamics of plant communities. To restore these dynamics, we could take advantage of the microclimatic conditions generated by remaining patches of vegetation and plastic mulch. These microclimatic conditions might have great importance in restoring disturbed lava fields located south of Mexico City, where the rock is exposed and the soil is shallow. We evalu...

This study concerns the detection and localization of weed patches in order to improve the knowledge on weed-crop competition. A remote control aircraft provided with a camera allowed to obtain low cost and repetitive information. Different processings were involved to detect weed patches using spatial then spectral methods. First, a shift of colorimetric base allowed to separate the soil and p...

Past change in remnant vegetation patches was modeled using remotely-sensed MSS and TM imagery and G.I.S. The images covering 27 years from 1973 to 2000 were used in detecting change in vegetation through post-classification comparison and modeling it through neural networks and logistic regression methods. Physical factors, image-based layers and landscape metrics provided the 19 predictor var...

Serpentine soils represent stressful habitats where plants have to cope with heavy metals, moisture limitation and low nutrient availability. We propose that facilitation is an important mechanism structuring plant communities under such stressful conditions. Facilitation has been shown to generate the spatial association of species, forming discrete vegetation patches of phylogenetically dista...

Encroachment of tall grasses and shrubs in coastal dunes has resulted in loss of vegetation heterogeneity. This is expected to have negative effects on animal diversity. To counteract encroachment and develop structural heterogeneity grazing is a widely used management practice. Here, we aim to functionally interpret changes in vegetation composition and configuration following grazing manageme...

which generally have little or no vegetation, produce runoff; sink areas, located downslope of the source arIn many semiarid regions, runoff and erosion differ according to eas, receive and store the runoff and thereby become vegetation patch type. These differences, although hypothesized to fundamentally affect ecological processes, have been poorly quantienriched and relatively productive. Th...