The regional variability in the uses of wild yams is assessed according to their availability in relation with land-use and climatic conditions from the South to the North sudanian sectors in Western Burkina Faso. The study involves field studies and modelling of the geographical distribution of yams and seeks correlations between environmental and ethno-biological data. Terrain analysis consists of phyto-ecological surveys and interviews with local inhabitants. A cluster analysis of a multi-date image of data obtained by remote-sensing is used to assess land-cover.

Conservationists have proposed that maintaining key elements of the original land-cover type in modified landscapes may mitigate the detrimental effects of land-cover change on residual species. We tested this hypothesis for aquatic insect communities in tank-forming bromeliads in forested and non-forested habitats in Costa Rica. Bromeliad tanks hold much of the standing water in this region and therefore provide an important resource for insects with aquatic larval stages.

Environmental change can be monitored and assessed by analyzing changes in bird populations. This study employed multivariate factorial kriging (MFK) to determine the multiscale changes in the distribution of five commonly observed bird species to urban environmental change. Areas of metropolitan Taipei were analyzed to determine the extent and effect of land cover. A digital elevation model and normalized difference vegetation index were also constructed. Spatial patterns of variation in bird populations were analyzed by MFK at a regional scale (16 km) and local scale (2 km).

Humans have fundamentally altered global patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem processes. Surprisingly, existing systems for representing these global patterns, including biome classifications, either ignore humans altogether or simplify human influence into, at most, four categories. Here, we present the first characterization of terrestrial biomes based on global patterns of sustained, direct human interaction with ecosystems. Eighteen “anthropogenic biomes” were identified through empirical analysis of global population, land use, and land cover.

The distributed hydrology soil vegetation model (DHSVM) is applied in the 107 km² Nam Mae Rim watershed (NMRW) in northern Thailand. Simulations using land cover scenarios for 1989 and 2002, extreme deforestation, and forest, each run with and without roads, show that roads have very small effects on the mean water fluxes, but significantly increase peak flows for all land cover scenarios. The magnitude of the road effect on peak flow depends on the land cover context in which the roads are placed.

We predict fine-scale species richness patterns at large spatial extents by linking a systematic sample of vascular plants with a multitude of independent environmental descriptors. Switzerland, covering 41,244 km² in central Europe. Vascular plant species data were collected along transects of 2500-m length within 1-km² quadrats on a systematic national grid (n = 354), using a standardized assessment method. Generalized linear models (GLM) were used to correlate species richness of vascular plants per transect (SRt) with three sets of variables: topography, environment and land cover.

Soil erosion caused by low vegetation cover associated with agricultural land use in the catchment is blamed for the eutrophication of Lake Victoria. Above-ground biomass as an indicator of vegetation cover and biodiversity was assessed using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, estimation of tree density and biomass with the aim of assessing the extent to which vegetation covers the soil surface. Tree density is significantly different between agricultural and semi-natural systems with an average of 96 and 90 trees ha⁻¹ observed in Rakai and Mayuge respectively.

There is strong pressure to embrace indicators for practical goals such as nature conservation and management and to evaluate the restoration success, but the selection of appropriate indicators is not straightforward. In addition, the grain and the type of data collected and data transformation adopted can influence restoration monitoring results. In this paper, we assessed the effect of changing indicator, grain size (i.e., plot dimension) and data transformation in discriminating different mapped plant communities, relying on vascular plant composition data.

Landscape changes identified from multitemporal land cover databases allow the detection of the changes of individual landscape elements with high spatio-temporal precision. The similarity of the causal relations as well the characteristic states of landscape before and after change allowed us to group individual land cover changes into the landscape change types representing more complex processes in the landscape. In the paper, 13 landscape change types were proposed for the analysis of major developmental trends in the study area during the last 50 years.

Global biodiversity is changing rapidly driven by human alteration of habitat, and nowhere this is more dramatic than in insular habitats. Yet land-cover change is a complex phenomenon that not only involves habitat destruction but also forest recovery over different time scales. Therefore, we might expect species to respond in diverse ways with likely consequences for the reorganization of regional assemblages. These changes, however, may be different in tropical islands because of their low species richness, generalist habits and high proportion of endemics.