Species distribution models (SDMs) are often used in conservation planning, but their utility can be improved by assessing the relationships between environmental and species response variables. We constructed SDMs for 30 stream fishes of Maryland, USA, using watershed attributes as environmental variables and presence/absence as species responses. SDMs showed substantial agreement between observed and predicted values for 17 species.

CONTEXT : Understanding the variability of vegetation distribution and its determinants is a central issue for addressing the effects of edges on ecological processes. Recent studies have revealed inconsistencies in the patterns of responses to edge effects that raise important questions about their determinants. We investigated the edge effect response patterns by adapting a recently proposed continuous approach to the case of small forest fragments in southwestern France.

Knowledge about the effects of changing environmental factors on stability of spatial structure of soil moisture is important in measurement design and spatial and land-atmosphere modeling, but was rarely considered. We examined the effects of soil temperature and moisture on spatial structure of daily soil moisture at 10-cm and 20-cm depth covering forest and grass sampling points (31 and 11, respectively) over 10months with a maximum between-point distance of 130m.

The rapid and efficient detection of illicit drug cultivation, such as that of Cannabis sativa, is important in reducing consumption. The objective of this study was to identify potential sites of illicit C. sativa plantations located in the semi-arid, southern part of Pernambuco State, Brazil. The study was conducted using an object-based image analysis (OBIA) of Système Pour l'Observation de la Terre high-resolution geometric (SPOT-5 HRG) images (overpass: 31 May, 2007).

Questions: What is the relative importance of landscape variables compared to habitat quality variables in determining species composition in floodplain forests across different physiographic areas? How do species composition and species traits relate to effects of particular landscape variables? Do lowland and mountain areas differ in effects of landscape variables on species composition? Location: Southern Czech Republic. Methods: A total of 240 vegetation relevés of floodplain forests with measured site conditions were recorded across six physiographic areas.

This work presents a procedure for classifying land-use and land-cover (LULC) types in the Brazilian Amazon. Fraction imagery representing proportions of green vegetation, soil, and shade was estimated using all six reflective bands of the Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM1 to TM5 and TM7) through the linear spectral mixing model (LSMM).

Although local variation in territorial predator density is often correlated with habitat quality, the causal mechanism underlying this frequently observed association is poorly understood and could stem from facultative adjustment in either group size or territory size. To test between these alternative hypotheses, we used a novel statistical framework to construct a winter population‐level utilization distribution for wolves (Canis lupus) in northern Ontario, which we then linked to a suite of environmental variables to determine factors influencing wolf space use.

The structural characteristics of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data are increasingly used to classify urban environments at fine scales, but have been underutilized for distinguishing heterogeneous land covers over large urban regions due to high cost, limited spectral information, and the computational difficulties posed by inherently large data volumes.

Woody encroachment has dramatically changed land cover patterns in arid and semiarid systems (drylands) worldwide over the past 150 years. This change is known to influence bulk soil carbon (C) pools, but the implications for dynamics and stability of these pools are not well understood.

Landscape homogenisation represents one of the gravest threats to the biodiversity of intensively farmed landscapes. In such landscapes, many species persist within remnants of (semi)natural habitats, such as in the steppe grasslands of Southern Moravia, SE Czech Republic. We investigated how the butterfly fauna of insular grassland reserves is affected by the heterogeneity of the surrounding farmland.

The question of how smallholders of the Amazon estuary, locally known as cabolcos , have adapted their land use systems to produce resources during booms and busts is analyzed in this article. We draw upon more than 50 years of census data and more than 30 years of remotely sensed land-cover data to reconstruct these dynamics from World War II to the present.

Super-resolution mapping (SRM) is a technique to produce a land cover map with finer spatial resolution by using fractional proportion images as input. A two-step SRM approach has been widely used. First, a fine-resolution indicator map is estimated for each class from the coarse-resolution fractional image. All indicator maps are then combined to create the final fine-resolution land cover map.