Few studies have investigated the influence of landownership on biodiversity. Therefore we analysed how the presence of forest understory plant species varied according to landownership in a broad geographical context and assessed which plant traits discriminated between species associated with state, other public or private forests. We also quantified the degree to which differences in soil ty...

Spatial variability in soil properties has long been observed within uniformly managed fields. Understanding the spatial characteristics of soil properties would be helpful in understanding soil–landscape relationships and in the development of site-specific management. The primary objective of this research was to quantify the spatial characteristics of claypan soil properties for a 4-ha agric...

The relationships between cover and AGB for the dominant and widely distributed alpine grasslands on the northern Tibetan Plateau is still not fully examined. The objectives of this study are to answer the following question: (1) How does aboveground biomass (AGB) of alpine grassland relate to plant cover at different spatial scales? (2) What are the major biotic and abiotic factors influencing...

The utilization of three-dimensional (3-D) graphical design and scientific visualization of the soil landscape continuum is still in its infancy. The objective of this study was to investigate the use of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to create virtual 3-D soil landscape models representing natural soil landscape components. Virtual Reality Modeling Language is an object-oriented, 3-D...

This publication introduces the concepts and principles of landscape ecology for managing wildlife and other natural resources. It is intended to raise public awareness and give an overview of a new philosophy and method for managing natural resources at the landscape level. A landscape is a heterogenous area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that are repeated in various sizes, sh...

BACKGROUND The advent of molecular techniques in microbial ecology has aroused interest in gaining an understanding about the spatial distribution of regional pools of soil microbes and the main drivers responsible of these spatial patterns. Here, we assessed the distribution of crenarcheal, bacterial and fungal communities in an alpine landscape displaying high turnover in plant species over s...

We investigated two approaches for large-scale analysis and prediction of the spatial distribution of soil properties in an agricultural landscape in the Canadian prairies. The first approach was based on the implementation of nine types of digital terrain models (DTMs) and regression analysis of soil and topographic data. The second approach used a concept of accumulation, transit, and dissipa...

Vegetation change, whether it be of anthropogenic or climatic origin, can have dramatic effects on landscape form, processes and sediment yield. General conceptual models for relationships between climate, vegetation and sediment yield exist for whole landscapes, but no rigorous analysis of the effects of vegetation change on sediment transport, in the absence of overland flow, has been done fr...

Soil movement by tillage redistributes soil within the profile and throughout the landscape, resulting in soil removal from convex slope positions and soil accumulation in concave slope positions. Previous investigations of the spatial variability in surface soil properties and crop yield in a glacial till landscape in west central Minnesota indicated that wheat (Triticum aestivum) yields were ...