The interactions between urban development and ecological processes are extraordinarily complex. Urban development evolves over time and space as the outcome of microscopic interactions of individual choices and actions taken by multiple agents. These decisions affect ecosystem structures and functions through the conversion of land, fragmentation of natural habitat use, disruption of hydrologi...

introduction urban landscape is experiencing rapid changes which put all urban domains under pressures. these processes revolutionize urban landscape into spaces without ecologic values. the sustainability of green patches and corridors has been scathed by lack of ecological approaches in planning and design. therefore, urban green spaces structures and functions have been damaged. green spaces...

Plans and policies are enhanced by information generated in Step 1, which involves analyzing the role that wetlands play in landscape processes. Landscape processes both maintain and interact with wetlands and the functions they perform. Landscape processes can include physical processes such as those that maintain hydrology and the physical stability of shorelines; chemical processes such as t...

identification of rapid degradation of ecological resources requires effective environmental monitoring including ecological integrity assessment .our first aim is to analyze ecological integrity in a landscape context while developing a method to assess integrity in spite of a dearth of historical data. we used a spatial-temporal reference framework for land cover maps for assessing ecologica...

Fire positively and negatively affects food webs across all trophic levels and guilds and influences a range of ecological processes that reinforce fire regimes, such as nutrient cycling and soil development, plant regeneration and growth, plant community assembly and dynamics, herbivory and predation. Thus we argue that rather than merely describing spatio-temporal patterns of fire regimes, py...

The scaling of physical, biological, ecological, and social phenomena is a major focus of efforts to develop simple representations of complex systems. Much of the attention has been on discovering universal scaling laws that emerge from simple physical and geometric processes. However, there are regular patterns of departures both from those scaling laws and from continuous distributions of at...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America O about 12% of Earth’s land is located in protected areas, and less than half of this is managed primarily for biodiversity conservation (Hoekstra et al. 2005). Although protected areas are an essential part of any credible conservation strategy (Margules and Pressey 2000), it is becoming increasingly clear that reserves alone will ...

the study of karst phenomena and its potentials has had always a particular importance in semi-arid zones of iran, specifically due to the lack of water sources. in this paper, we are going to discuss the landscape morphology in karstic areas, and the way we can have an ecological planning approach to it. maharlu karst basin was selected as the case study of karstic area, and kaftarak mount in ...

Opportunities to conduct large-scale field experiments are rare, but provide a unique opportunity to reveal the complex processes that operate within natural ecosystems. Here, we review the design of existing, large-scale forest fragmentation experiments. Based on this review, we develop a design for the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project, a new forest fragmentation experimen...