Researchers have independently documented the effects of land use on rivers and threats to river management institutions, but the relationship between changes in institutional context and river condition is not well described. This study assesses the connections between resource management institutions, land use, and rivers by integrating social science, geospatial analysis, and geomorphology. ...

Recently disturbed and ‘control’ (i.e. less recently disturbed) soils in the Mojave Desert were compared for their vulnerability to wind erosion, using a wind tunnel, before and after being experimentally trampled. Before trampling, control sites had greater cyanobacterial biomass, soil surface stability, threshold friction velocities (TFV; i.e. the wind speed required to move soil particles), ...

In this paper we present two new texture segmentation algorithms based on local spectrum analysis with the two dimensional S-Transform. The effectiveness of these algorithms is demonstrated both on simple synthetic images, and complicated, real images of glacial sediment deposits. The S-Transform method is robust and is insensitive to changes in light intensity, and moisture variations. The eff...

Concentrated seabed deposits of polymetallic nodules, which are rich in economically valuable metals (e.g., copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese), occur over vast areas of the abyssal Pacific Ocean floor. Little is currently known about the diversity of microorganisms inhabiting abyssal habitats. In this study, sediment, nodule, and water column samples were collected from the Clarion-Clipperton Z...

Biological response and ecological indices of benthic communities, such as greater mortality of foraminifera and shell abnormalities, have been used to document pollution effects on ecosystems. Shadegan Wetland was damaged from a deposition of huge amounts of soot and products of burning oilwells of Kuwait as well as chronic exhaust fumes of refinery and industrial furnaces. In this investigati...

This thesis proposes a novel method to combine the colour and the texture for colour texture segmentation. The objective of this research work is to derive a framework for colour texture segmentation and to determine the contribution of colour in colour texture analysis. The colour texture processing is based on the feature extraction from colour-textured images. The texture features were obtai...

Sediment is a special realm in aquatic environments and has high microbial diversity. Addition of organic electron donors to sediments stimulated heterotrophic activity. Bacteria utilize the more available fractions of the organic detritus in their own metabolism, leaving indigestible residues known as marine humus. Input of nitrogen and carbon from vegetated regions into freshwater sediments a...

Waves and currents create bottom shear stress, a force at the seabed that influences sediment texture distribution, micro-topography, habitat, and anthropogenic use. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the magnitude, variability, and driving mechanisms of bottom stress and resultant sediment mobility on regional scales using numerical model output. The analysis was applied to the Mi...