remote sensing and aerial photographs are used to produce medium to small scale images. however, for detailed information especially to estimate rangeland vegetation canopy cover there is a need to larger scale images. it is therefore necessary to study the technical applicability of different devices such as short range light airplanes, kites, gliders and balloons. in this research, we focused...

water erosion causes severe soil damage in northern forests of iran which is associated with different rut depths in skid trails. the aim of this study was to assess rutting and soil displacement on skid trails to mitigate water erosion. therefore the research was carried out in eight parcels of district no 3 of shafarood forest in the north of iran. in order to evaluate the amount of erosion i...

Estimates of forest canopy cover are widely used in forest research and management, yet methods used to quantify canopy cover and the estimates they provide vary greatly. Four commonly used ground-based techniques for estimating overstory cover – line-intercept, spherical densiometer, moosehorn, and hemispherical photography – and cover estimates generated from crown radii parameters of the wes...

The height and shape of shrub canopies are critical measurements for characterizing shrub steppe rangelands. Remote sensing technologies might provide an efficient method to acquire these measurements across large areas. This study compared point-cloud and rasterized lidar data to field-measured sagebrush height and shape to quantify the correlation between field-based and lidar-derived estimat...

Much interest lies in long-term recovery rates of sagebrush communities after fire in the western United States, as sagebrush communities comprise millions of hectares of rangelands and are an important wildlife habitat. Little is known about postfire changes in sagebrush canopy cover over time, especially at a landscape scale. We studied postfire recovery of shrub canopy cover in sagebrush-ste...

We installed a field experiment to support the development of protocols to restore longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) to existing mature loblolly pine (P. taeda L.) stands at Camp Lejeune, NC. Seven canopy treatments included four uniform and three gap treatments. The four uniform treatments were defined by target residual basal area (BA) [control (uncut), BA9, BA4.5, and BA0 (clearcut) m2/h...

Ferula pseudalliacea (Bitter asafetida) is an endemic medicinal plant grown in the center of Iran, which is used in pharmaceutical industries. There is less report about its habitat characteristics and distribution in Iran. So, this research was conducted to study the effects of topography and soil properties on distribution of this species in Yazd Province, Iran in 2016 and 2017. Two habitats ...