Interactions between vegetation and fire have the potential to overshadow direct effects of climate change on fire regimes in boreal forests of North America. We develop methods to compare sediment-charcoal records with fire regimes simulated by an ecologica model, ALFRESCO (Alaskan Frame-based Ecosystem Code) and apply these methods to evaluate potential causes of a mid-Holocene fire-regime sh...

This research has concentrated on the physical and socio-economic impacts of vegetation-based management scenarios targeting on flooding and soil erosion issues in the Ramian watersheds. The Ramian watershed with an approximate area of 24000 ha is located in Golestan, Iran. For each sub-watershed, four biological actions (activities) and 16 management scenarios have been considered. Physical im...

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon has become a serious problem in recent years. It is necessary to study the mitigation methods and quantify their effects on UHI. In this paper, based on the remote sensed data, an empirical model was established as a negative function of land surface temperature (LST) to vegetation coverage. Urban heat island intensity (UHII) was estimated by a robust stat...

We developed a new climate-sensitive vegetation state-and-transition simulation model (CV-STSM) to simulate future vegetation at a fine spatial grain commensurate with the scales of human land-use decisions, and under the joint influences of changing climate, site productivity, and disturbance. CV-STSM integrates outputs from four different modeling systems. Successional changes in tree species...

This study aims to assess how high-latitude vegetation may respond under various climate scenarios during the 21st century with a focus on analyzing model parameters induced uncertainty and how this uncertainty compares to the uncertainty induced by various climates. The analysis was based on a set of 10,000 Monte Carlo ensemble Lund-Potsdam-Jena (LPJ) simulations for the northern high latitude...

The pace of on-going climate change calls for reliable plant biodiversity scenarios. Traditional dynamic vegetation models use plant functional types that are summarized to such an extent that they become meaningless for biodiversity scenarios. Hybrid dynamic vegetation models of intermediate complexity (hybrid-DVMs) have recently been developed to address this issue. These models, at the cross...

Vegetation models can be used to assess the impacts of climate change on future food production (i.e. farming). However, vegetation models are computationally expensive to run and to account for the uncertainty in future climate scenarios the models should, ideally, be run using as many different scenarios as possible. One way of reducing the computational cost of this procedure is to fit a sta...

Ecological models based on physical, chemical, and biological processes are diicult to develop and calibrate. Neural network methods provide an attractive alternative where the model is constructed automatically. We compared the MAPSS global vegetation model to a collection of neural network models trained on a data set covering current climate and vegetation distribution in the coterminous Uni...

A mosaic of intact native and human-modified vegetation use can provide important habitat for top predators such as the puma (Puma concolor), avoiding negative effects on other species and ecological processes due to cascade trophic interactions. This study investigates the effects of restoration scenarios on the puma's habitat suitability in the most developed Brazilian region (São Paulo State...