The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called ‘landscape mosaic’ as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible landsc...

McIntosh, Anne C.S.; Gray, Andrew N.; Garman, Steven L. 2009. Canopy structure on forest lands in western Oregon: differences among forest types and stand ages. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-794. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 35 p. Canopy structure is an important attribute affecting economic and ecological values of forests in the P...

Remote sensing has been considered a low-cost, large-area coverage forest information resource ideally suited to broad-scale forest inventory objectives. The objective of this study is to determine stand type parameters such as crown closure, development stage and stand types, and land cover obtained from Landsat 7 ETM image and forest cover type map (stand type map). The research also focuses ...

LANDFIRE is a large interagency project that supports national fire management and fuels treatment activities. A primary data product of LANDFIRE is a detailed vegetation type classification. This study describes how independent data from Landsat imagery, topographic data, biophysical data layers, and dependent field-collected data can be used in a hierarchical mapping approach to improve veget...

This paper describes a combined remote sensing-GIS-logistic regression approach of merging extracted information from Landsat images with georeferenced biophysical and socio-economic datasets in the detection and analysis of the driving forces of forest cover change in Agusan del Norte (ADN) in Mindanao Island, Philippines, a province where forest resource use have been historically extensive. ...

The aims o f this study were ( 1 ) to determine the relative importance o f the independent effects o f forest cover and fragmentation on the distribution o f forest breeding birds, and ( 2 ) to test the hypothesis that the negative ef fect o f forest fragmentation on species distribution increases with decreasing forest cover, i.e., the negative interaction ef fect o f forest cover and fragmen...

Conservation policies influence both the amount of habitat loss and patterns of habitat fragmentation. This paper develops a “microlandscapes” approach that combines fragmentation measures with quasi-experimental evaluation methods in order to assess the effects of policy on habitat fragmentation. As an application, the paper estimates whether and to what extent wildlife sanctuaries and nationa...

Quantifying the effects of forest changes on hydrology in large watersheds is important for designing forest or land management and adaptation strategies for watershed ecosystem sustainability. Minjiang River watershed, located in the upper reach of the Yangtze River basin, plays a strategic role in the environmental protection and economic and social well-being for both the watershed and the e...

This paper assesses the role of protected and community managed forests for the long term maintenance of forest cover in the tropics. Through a meta-analysis of published case-studies, we compare land use/ cover change data for these two broad types of forest management and assess their performance in maintaining forest cover. Case studies included 40 protected areas and 33 community managed fo...

This study investigated whether high-resolution satellite imagery is suitable for preparing a detailed digital forest cover map that discriminates forest cover at the tree species level. First, we tried to find an optimal process for segmenting the high-resolution images using a region-growing method with the scale, color and shape factors in Definiens(®) Professional 5.0. The image was classif...