Drivers of forest productivity in two regions of the United States: Relative impacts of management and environmental variables.

Climate, environmental conditions, and management strategies are key factors affecting forest net ecosystem production (NEP). However, little is known about the relationship between management approaches and regional to continental-scale forest productivity. In this study, we utilized forests of the U.

Regional-scale management maps for forested areas of the Southeastern United States and the US Pacific Northwest.

Forests in the United States are managed by multiple public and private entities making harmonization of available data and subsequent mapping of management challenging. We mapped four important types of forest management, production, ecological, passive, and preservation, at 250-meter spatial resolution in the Southeastern (SEUS) and Pacific Northwest (PNW) USA. Both ecologically and socio-economically dynamic regions, the SEUS and PNW forests represent, respectively, 22.

Association between ecological factors and the presence of Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus larvae in Puerto Rico.

A prevalence study was conducted to survey tick larvae populations in Puerto Rico (PR), compare the number of infested sites with Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus larvae between the wet and dry season, and assess the associations of ecologic factors on the presence of R. microplus larvae. Ninety-six sites were selected using a GIS-based sampling method.

A spatio-temporal analysis of fire recurrence and extent for semi-arid savanna ecosystems in Southern Africa using moderate-resolution satellite imagery.

Savanna ecosystems are semi-arid and fire-prone. Increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation in Southern Africa will probably have a series of strong impacts on the various components of fire regimes in these ecosystems that will, in turn, affect their ecology, structure, and function. This paper presents a geospatial analysis to quantify changes in fire frequency, seasonality and spatial distribution during the last decade and creates a fire return interval map for the core area of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which spans five Southern African countries and is the largest cooperative multistate conservation region in the world.

Sampling design for an integrated socioeconomic and ecological survey by using satellite remote sensing and ordination.

Environmental variability is an important risk factor in rural agricultural communities. Testing models requires empirical sampling that generates data that are representative in both economic and ecological domains. Detrended correspondence analysis of satellite remote sensing data were used to design an effective low-cost sampling protocol for a field study to create an integrated socioeconomic and ecological database when no prior information on ecology of the survey area existed.