Monitoring and reporting on the status of Natura 2000 habitats is an obligation under the 1992 Habitats Directive for each member state of the European Union (EU). Satellite imagery providing up-to-date information for a large areal coverage could be an interesting source to complement conventional, but laborious, field-driven surveying methods. Quality of habitats can be assessed through their...

the significance of spatial heterogeneity in understanding ecological processes has been recognized long ago. one of the earliest expressions of this recognition is the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis that links spatial  heterogeneity to niche vegetation patterns formation and species coexistence. yet, an  important if not crucial  aspect of landscape heterogeneity has escaped deep considerati...

We analyse the behaviour of Cacajao melanocephalus ouakary feeding at patches of germinating seedlings in dried-out flooded forest. Seedlings of Eschweilera tenuifolia (Lecythidaceae) were the most commonly eaten (88.9%). Some seed patches were revisited over several days, while others were consistently ignored. We tested 3 predictions relating uacari terrestrial foraging behaviour to: (1) arbo...

When choosing which environmental attributes to monitor in assessing disturbance, it is important to consider not onlywhichmetric will provide themost sensitive indicator of disturbance, but also the spatial considerations of where in the landscape thatmetric will bemost responsive to change.Degradation in landscapes is often unevenly expressed because: (i) disturbance is spatially localised, (...

BACKGROUND The total amount of native vegetation is an important property of fragmented landscapes and is known to exert a strong influence on population and metapopulation dynamics. As the relationship between habitat loss and local patch and gap characteristics is strongly non-linear, theoretical models predict that immigration rates should decrease dramatically at low levels of remaining nat...

Patterns of habitat use by breeding birds were studied in cottonwood riparian forests along 100 km of the South Fork of the Snake River in southeastern Idaho, United States, from 1991 to 1994. A hierarchical approach was used to examine habitat use at three spatial scales: microhabitat (local vegetation characteristics), macrohabitat (cottonwood forest patch characteristics), and landscape (com...

The management of vegetated areas by urban planners relies on detailed and updated knowledge of their nature and distribution. Manual photo-interpretation of aerial photographs is efficient, but is time consuming. Image segmentation and object-oriented classifications provide a tool to automatically delineate and label vegetation units. Object-oriented techniques were tested with a very high-re...

1 Vegetation mosaics of grassland and exposed soil are often the outcome of intense herbivory and represent alternate stable states, although the vegetational and soil processes that both initiate and maintain the states in response to herbivory are poorly understood. 2 The vegetation mosaic resulting from grubbing by geese was examined on the intertidal flats at La Pérouse Bay, Manitoba. Soil ...