Knowledge of temporal variations of Leaf Area Index (LAI) aids in understanding the climate-vegetation interaction of different vegetative systems. This information is amenable from high temporal remote sensing data. India has around 78.37 million hectare, accounting for 23.84% of the geographic area of the country under forest/tree cover. India has a diverse set of vegetation types ranging fro...

A snow-cover mapping method accounting for forests (SnowFrac) is presented. SnowFrac uses spectral unmixing and endmember constraints to estimate the snow-cover fraction of a pixel. The unmixing is based on a linear spectral mixture model, which includes endmembers for snow, coniferous trees, branches of leafless deciduous trees and snow-free ground. Model input consists of a land-cover fractio...

—RADARSAT-1 synthetic aperture radar data, speckle reduction, and texture measures provided for separation among forest types within the Twin Cities metropolitan area, MN, USA. The highest transformed divergence values for 16-bit data resulted from speckle filtering while the highest values for 8-bit data resulted from the orthorectified image, before and after performing a histogram stretch. F...

MODIS data is of significant for the classification of regional forest cover due to its high temporal resolution and high spectral resolution. Forest cover is an important parameter for forest ecosystem. The objective of this preliminary study is to mapping forest cover from mutli-temporal MODIS data with decision tree. The classification forest samples were selected from four global land cover...

We investigated whether fish assemblage structure in southern Appalachian streams differed with historical and contemporary forest cover. We compared fish assemblages in 2(nd)-4(th) order streams draining watersheds that had increased forest cover between 1950 and 1993 (i.e., reforesting watersheds). We sampled fish in 50 m reaches during August 2001 and calculated catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) ...

Quantification of spatial and temporal changes in forest cover is an essential component of forest monitoring programs. Due to its cloud free capability, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an ideal source of information on forest dynamics in countries with near-constant cloud-cover. However, few studies have investigated the use of SAR for forest cover estimation in landscapes with highly sparse...

Upland forests of the southern Lake Superior region are diverse and contain a shifting mosaic of eastern hemlock [Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.] and northern hardwood forests dominated by sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.). In this study, we survey the relative effects of management practice (old growth vs. managed), forest cover type (hemlock vs. northern hardwood), and soil great group (Entic ...

The paper investigated the application of MODIS data for mapping regional land cover at moderate resolutions (250 and 500 m), for regional conservation purposes. Land cover maps were generated for two major conservation areas (Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—GYE, USA and the Pará State, Brazil) using MODIS data and decision tree classifications. The MODIS land cover products were evaluated using ...

The Cauvery basin of Karnataka State encompasses a range of land cover types, from dense forest areas and plantations in the Western Ghats hills, to fertile agricultural lands in the river valley. Recent demographic changes, rapid economic development and urbanization have led to the conversion of vast stretches of forested land into plantations and permanent agriculture. We examine the human d...

Sinarundinaria alpina (Schumann) C.S. Chao & Renvoise, a tropical African montane bamboo, is heavily used by local communities for household items such as granaries, baskets, ropes and trays. This article presents the results of a study carried out on the abundance, distribution and utilisation of S. alpina in Bwindi and Mgahinga National Parks. Both in-forest and household surveys were used to...