A Holistic Landscape Description Reveals That Landscape Configuration Changes More over Time than Composition: Implications for Landscape Ecology Studies.

Background: Space-for-time substitution-that is, the assumption that spatial variations of a system can explain and predict the effect of temporal variations-is widely used in ecology. However, it is questionable whether it can validly be used to explain changes in biodiversity over time in response to land-cover changes.

Hypothesis: Here, we hypothesize that different temporal vs spatial trajectories of landscape composition and configuration may limit space-for-time substitution in landscape ecology.

Understanding patchy landscape dynamics: towards a landscape language.

Patchy landscapes driven by human decisions and/or natural forces are still a challenge to be understood and modelled. No attempt has been made up to now to describe them by a coherent framework and to formalize landscape changing rules. Overcoming this lacuna was our first objective here, and this was largely based on the notion of Rewriting Systems, also called Formal Grammars.

Mapping urban climate zones and quantifying climate behaviors--an application on Toulouse urban area (France).

Facing the concern of the population to its environment and to climatic change, city planners are now considering the urban climate in their choices of planning. The use of climatic maps, such Urban Climate Zone‑UCZ, is adapted for this kind of application. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the UCZ classification, integrated in the World Meteorological Organization guidelines, first can be automatically determined for sample areas and second is meaningful according to climatic variables.