Aim We test the prediction that beta diversity (species turnover) and the decay of community similarity with distance depend on spatial resolution (grain). We also study whether patterns of beta diversity are related to variability in climate, land cover or geographic distance and how the independent effects of these variables depend on the spatial grain of the data. Location Europe, Great Britain, Finland and Catalonia. Methods We used data on European birds, plants, butterflies, amphibians and reptiles, and data on British plants, Catalonian birds and Finnish butterflies.

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.

Modeled carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions from an urban area are validated against direct eddy-covariance flux measurements. Detailed maps of modeled local carbon-dioxide emissions for a 4 km² residential neighborhood in Vancouver, BC, Canada are produced. Inputs to the emission model include urban object classifications (buildings, trees, land-cover) automatically derived from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and optical remote sensing in combination with census, assessment, traffic and measured radiation and climate data.

Surface albedo determines radiative forcing and is a key parameter for driving Earth’s climate. Better characterization of surface albedo for individual land cover types can reduce the uncertainty in estimating changes to Earth’s radiation balance due to land cover change. This paper presents new albedo look-up maps (LUM) using a multi-scale hierarchical approach based on MODIS BRDF/albedo products and Landsat imagery. Ten years (2001-2011) of MODIS BRDF/albedo products were used to generate global albedo climatology.

Understanding factors that drive the choice of breeding habitats for birds is important for species management and conservation. We addressed this question in the case of the European Roller Coracias garrulus, an endangered species listed in Annex I of the European Union directive for bird conservation. For secondary hole-nesting birds, such as rollers, the breeding micro- and macrohabitat selection may rely on the location of the nest hole in a tree and its immediate surrounding environment as well as the larger scale foraging habitat.

Global, long-term monitoring of changes in Earth's land surface requires quantitative comparisons of satellite images acquired under widely varying atmospheric conditions. Although physically based estimates of surface reflectance (SR) ultimately provide the most accurate representation of Earth's surface properties, there has never been a globally consistent SR dataset at the spatial resolution (b1 ha) or temporal extent (~40 years) of the Landsat mission.

Declining urban tree canopy cover in the United States underscores the importance of elucidating factors that influence the distribution of urban trees. This is particularly relevant as most urban trees are located on private property while their canopies maintain ecosystem services that constitute public goods. Thus, municipalities establish institutions in the form of canopy cover goals and various policies to incentivize private actions to meet those goals.

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.