Boulengerula uluguruensis is a terrestrial caeciliid caecilian described from the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania. We investigated the relative abundance of B. uluguruensis in agricultural and forested habitats at the beginning of the rainy season. This caecilian was found over a wide altitudinal range (450–1175 m a.s.l.), and in many land cover types (including natural forest, plantation forest and small scale agriculture), and different soil textures (including very compact soil). Based on quantitative and semi‐quantitative surveys, B.

The planning and management of urban forest has become increasingly important as a focus of urban environmental management. The objectives of this study were to analyze the landuse/land cover and to map functional zones of the urban forest in the upper catchment area of Addis Ababa. This study identifies five landuse/land cover types: (i) Eucalyptus–Juniperus dominated forest, (ii) mixed native forest, (iii) built-up areas, (iv) Eucalyptus plantation (v) crop/grazing lands.

Understanding the relationship between the distribution of organisms and their environment is important for regional conservation planning. While most herpetofaunal community studies address environmental influence on species richness, few studies describe environmental influence on species composition at geographic scales. Field surveys of herpetofauna were conducted during 1994-2000 in Tochigi Prefecture, which covers ca. 6400 km_ of mainland Japan and includes a wide range of elevation, annual mean temperature, and human population densities.

Tropical mountain regions are prone to landslide hazards. Given the current land pressure with increasing occupation of steep uplands, landslide hazards are expected to increase in the near future. Understanding the factors that control landslide hazards is therefore essential. Rare event logistic regression allows us to perform a robust detection of landslide controlling factors. This technique is here applied to the tropical Andes to evaluate the impact of dynamic land cover changes on landslide occurrences. Land cover change trajectories (i.e.

The distribution of invasive plants across a landscape is largely governed by disturbance invoking anthropogenic land-use practices and propagule pressure. However, spatial variability associated with anthropogenic disturbances and propagule pressure is seldom used to develop distribution models of invasive plants. This study makes use of large-scale survey data to develop a spatially explicit predictive model for the invasive wetland plant—purple loosestrife.

The Persian Long-tailed Desert Lizard, Mesalina watsonana , is one of the most common and most widely distributed lizards on the Iranian Plateau extending from Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The species is frequently encountered in various types of habitats. We collected over 600 distributional records from available literature, museum collections, and our own field work and used bioclimatic and land cover characteristics to develop a model of potential distribution for M. watsonana . According to the model, the most important factors limiting the distribution of M.

The initial step in most object-based classification methodologies is the application of a segmentation algorithm to define objects. In the context of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image analysis, the presence of speckle noise might hamper the segmentation quality. The aim of this study is to assess the segmentation performance of SAR images when no filter or different filters are applied before segmentation.

CONTEXT: The loss of landscape heterogeneity is causing declines of farmland biodiversity around the world. Traditional farmland regions are often highly heterogeneous and harbor high biodiversity, but are under threat of land cover homogenization due to changing agricultural practices. One species potentially affected by landscape homogenization is the Corncrake (Crex crex), which is threatened in Western Europe but remains widespread in the traditional farmland regions of Eastern Europe.

CONTEXT: Insect species of different trophic level will respond differently to landscape configuration. OBJECTIVE: In this context we explore the way landscape structure affects the distribution and abundance of the whitefly Siphoninus phillyreae and its predator Clitostethus arcuatus in olive orchards. METHODS: Adult individuals of these two species were collected using sticky traps placed in 12 olive host patches in Argentina. Host patches were detected and quantified using Landsat 5 TM images. Different landscape metrics were estimated for the study area land covers.

Rapid development of shrimp farming may lead to unrecognized and undesirable changes of land cover/land use patterns in coastal areas. Of special concern is the loss of mangrove forest in coastal areas such as Quang Ninh, Vietnam, which is adjacent to the World Heritage-listed Ha Long Bay. Understanding the status and changes of land cover/land use for coastal shrimp farms and mangrove forests can support environmental protection and decision-making for sustainable development in coastal areas.

Soil erosion is one of the major threats to the conservation of soil and water resources in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region (DRR), China. In order to describe the areas with high soil erosion risk (SER) and to develop adequate erosion prevention measures, SER in the DRR was assessed by integrating the CORINE model with GIS and RS.

In any watershed, many factors influence land use/cover change (LUCC). The nonlinear relationships between these factors and LUCC are very complicated and make it difficult to build a model that is capable of accurately simulating the range of physical processes. The aim of this study was: (1) to simplify the structure of a simulation model and improve its simulation speed, and (2) evaluate the impact of land use/cover change on surface runoff and evapotranspiration.