Quantifying the amount of forest and change in the amount of forest are key to ensure that appropriate management practices and policies are in place to maintain the array of ecosystem services provided by forests. There are a range of analytical techniques and data available to estimate these forest parameters, however, not all ‘forest’ is the same and various components of change have been pr...

to detection of suitable sampling method to study tree canopy cover in the northern zagros forest, baneeh region forest, kurdistan province, and west of iran was selected. 40 square sample plots one hectare (100×100 m) were selected and perfect inventoried. in every sample plot the position of tree, kind of species and two diameter of crown (m) were recorded. to study of canopy cover different ...

Great changes in land use/land cover from rapid urbanization have occurred in the PearlRiver Delta, China. As the primary cause of land development in the urbanization process,urban expansion has mostly occurred on land with higher NPP, significantly impacting theregional ecosystems. The primary purpose of this study was to reveal the impacts of urbanexpansion on the regional NPP. The land cove...

BACKGROUND Remote sensing products can provide regular and consistent observations of the Earth´s surface to monitor and understand the condition and change of forest ecosystems and to inform estimates of terrestrial carbon dynamics. Yet, challenges remain to select the appropriate satellite data source for ecosystem carbon monitoring. In this study we examine the impacts of three attributes of...

China’s Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), introduced in 1998 and 1999, respectively, are integral parts of the world’s largest reforestation effort. Statereported forest cover data indicate effective policy implementation through net forest cover expansion but overlook the scale-dependence of and spatial variation in forest cover change pattern...

A survey of numerous field studies shows that nitrogen and phosphorous export coefficients are significantly different across forest, agriculture, and urban land-cover types. We used simulations to estimate the land-cover composition at which there was a significant risk of nutrient loads representative of watersheds without forest cover. The results suggest that at between 20 percent and 30 pe...

In the wake of numerous catastrophic wildfires, forest management policies have been implemented in recent years in the United States, including the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003. A key premise underlying these policies is that fire suppression has resulted in denser forests than were present historically in some forest types. We evaluate this premise for the montane zone of the northe...

The Republic of Panama recently experienced a limited forest transition. After five decades of decline, the total forest cover increased by 0.36% yr" between 1992 and 2000; however, mature forest cover simultaneously decreased by 1.3% yr". This limited forest transition at the national scale comprised two distinctly different patterns of recent forest-cover change related to historical land use...

We studied northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) demography in the eastern Washington Cascade Range to test hypotheses about regional and local abundance patterns and to inform managers of the possible effects of fire and fuels management on flying squirrels. We quantified habitat characteristics and squirrel density, population trends, and demography in three typical forest cover types...