Maintaining pasture ground cover is important in preventing environmental degradation of grasslands and associated riparian areas. The objective of this work was to determine the effect of ground cover on sediment and P export from pastured riparian areas under simulated rainfall events. Plots were established on two sites in the North Carolina Piedmont: a 10% slope with Appling sandy loam soil...

Lichens form a critical portion of barren ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) diets, especially during winter months. Here, we assess lichen mat volume across five herd ranges in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, Canada, using newly developed composite Landsat imagery. The lichen volume estimator (LVE) was adapted for use across 700 000 km2 of barren ground caribou habitat ann...

landslide also referred to as mass movement, slope failures, slope instability, and terrain instability is the mass movement, usually sudden, of soil and debris down a steep slope (Cruden, 1991). They are caused by a variety of factors such as heavy rains, earthquake ground shaking or geological forces. Different types of landslides move down slope at a wide range of speeds (Varnes, 1978). Most...

There are two challenges in classifying lidar points into ground and non-ground points on Texas coastal areas, which usually has a low-lying landform consisting of morphological features including dunes, tidal and river channels with levees, barren flats, buildings, and trees with varying cover density. The first is to remove buildings and trees meanwhile keeping seawall, dunes, levees and chan...

Prospective control of walking and running requires perceiving sloping surfaces that can and cannot support these activities. Two experiments on slant perception were conducted, motivated by the notion of geographical slant rather than optical slant, and by an affordance based description of surface layout. In Experiment 1, participants standing on a horizontal surface (the ground) adjusted the...

It was shown in Spong [1999b] that the passive gaits for a planar 2DOF biped walking on a shallow slope (Goswami et al. [1995]) can be made slope invariant by a passivity based control that compensates only the gravitational torques acting on the biped. In this paper we extend these results to the general case of a 3-D, n-DOF robot. We show that if there exists a passive walking gait, i.e., if ...

During an earthquake, significant damage can result due to instability of the soil in the area affected by internal seismic waves. A liquefaction-induced lateral ground displacement has been a very damaging type of ground failure during past strong earthquakes. In this study, neuro-fuzzy group method of data handling (NF-GMDH) is utilized for assessment of lateral displacement in both ground sl...

Maintaining ground cover of forages may reduce the export of nitrogen (N) from pastures. The objective of this work was to determine the effect of ground cover on N export from pastured riparian areas receiving simulated rainfall. Plots were established on two adjacent sites in the North Carolina Piedmont: one of 10% slope with Appling sandy loam soils and a second of 20% slope with Wedowee san...