Losses of natural and semi-natural forests, mostly to agriculture, are a significant concern for biodiversity. Against this trend, the area of intensively managed plantation forests increases, and there is much debate about the implications for biodiversity. We provide a comprehensive review of the function of plantation forests as habitat compared with other land cover, examine the effects on biodiversity at the landscape scale, and synthesise context-specific effects of plantation forestry on biodiversity. Natural forests are usually more suitable as habitat for a wider range of native forest species than plantation forests but there is abundant evidence that plantation forests can provide valuable habitat, even for some threatened and endangered species, and may contribute to the conservation of biodiversity by various mechanisms. In landscapes where forest is the natural land cover, plantation forests may represent a low-contrast matrix, and afforestation of agricultural land can assist conservation by providing complementary forest habitat, buffering edge effects, and increasing connectivity. In contrast, conversion of natural forests and afforestation of natural non-forest land is detrimental. However, regional deforestation pressure for agricultural development may render plantation forestry a ‘lesser evil’ if forest managers protect indigenous vegetation remnants. We provide numerous context-specific examples and case studies to assist impact assessments of plantation forestry, and we offer a range of management recommendations. This paper also serves as an introduction and background paper to this special issue on the effects of plantation forests on biodiversity.

Plantation Forests and Biodiversity: Oxymoron or Opportunity?

Texture features for image classification and retrieval.

Estimating the soil erosion cover-management factor at the European scale

Monitoring and modelling of urban sprawl using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Remote sensing-based methods of aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation in forest ecosystems have gained increased attention, and substantial research has been conducted in the past three decades. This paper provides a survey of current biomass estimation methods using remote sensing data and discusses four critical issues – collection of field-based biomass reference data, extraction and selection of suitable variables from remote sensing data, identification of proper algorithms to develop biomass estimation models, and uncertainty analysis to refine the estimation procedure. Additionally, we discuss the impacts of scales on biomass estimation performance and describe a general biomass estimation procedure. Although optical sensor and radar data have been primary sources for AGB estimation, data saturation is an important factor resulting in estimation uncertainty. LIght Detection and Ranging (lidar) can remove data saturation, but limited availability of lidar data prevents its extensive application. This...

A survey of remote sensing-based aboveground biomass estimation methods in forest ecosystems

This article discusses research in which the authors applied the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), remote sensing, and geographical information system (GIS) to the maping of soil erosion risk in Brazilian Amazonia. Soil map and soil survey data were used to develop the soil erodibility factor (K), and a digital elevation model image was used to generate the topographic factor (LS). The cover-management factor (C) was developed based on vegetation, shade, and soil fraction images derived from spectral mixture analysis of a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus image. Assuming the same climatic conditions and no support practice in the study area, the rainfall–runoff erosivity (R) and the support practice (P) factors were not used. The majority of the study area has K values of less than 0·2, LS values of less than 2·5, and C values of less than 0·25. A soil erosion risk map with five classes (very low, low, medium, medium-high, and high) was produced based on the simplified RUSLE within the GIS environment, and was linked to land use and land cover (LULC) image to explore relationships between soil erosion risk and LULC distribution. The results indicate that most successional and mature forests are in very low and low erosion risk areas, while agroforestry and pasture are usually associated with medium to high risk areas. This research implies that remote sensing and GIS provide promising tools for evaluating and mapping soil erosion risk in Amazonia. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Mapping soil erosion risk in Rondônia, Brazilian Amazonia: using RUSLE, remote sensing and GIS

This paper develops a methodology for integration of remote sensing and census data within a GIS framework to assess the quality of life in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Environmental variables, i.e. greenness, impervious surface and temperature, were derived from a Landsat ETM+ image. Socio-economic variables, including population density, income, poverty, employment rate, education level and house characteristics from US census 2000, were integrated with the environmental variables at the block group level to derive indicators of quality of life. Pearson's correlation was computed to analyse the relationships among the variables. Further, factor analysis was conducted to extract unique information from the combined dataset. Three factors were identified and interpreted as material welfare, environmental conditions and crowdedness respectively. Each factor was viewed as a unique aspect of the quality of life. A synthetic index of the urban quality of life was created and mapped based on weighted factor scores of the three factors. Finally, regression models were built to estimate the quality of life in the city of Indianapolis based on selected environmental and socioeconomic variables.

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Measuring the quality of life in city of Indianapolis by integration of remote sensing and census data

Research on change detection techniques has long been an active topic and many techniques have been developed. In reality, change detection is a comprehensive procedure that requires careful consideration of many factors such as the nature of change detection problems, image preprocessing, selection of suitable variables and algorithms. This paper briefly overviews the major steps involved in a change detection, summarises major change detection methods, discusses the impacts of scales and complexity of study areas on the selection of remote-sensing data and change detection algorithms and finally discusses the needs of developing new change detection methods. As high spatial resolution images are easily available in the past decade, texture- and object-based methods become valuable to improve change detection performance. At national and global scales, coarse spatial resolution satellite images such as MODIS become important data sources for rapidly detecting land-cover change, but results have high unce...

Current situation and needs of change detection techniques

Residential population estimation was explored based on impervious surface coverage in Marion County, Indiana, USA. The impervious surface was developed by spectral unmixing of a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) multispectral image. The residential impervious surface was then derived by geographic information system (GIS) overlay of residential land class and impervious surface. Regression analysis was conducted to develop population density estimation models. We found that the residential impervious surface‐based approach provided the best population density estimation result, with mean and median relative errors of 38% and 23%, respectively. An overall population estimation error of −0.97% was achieved.

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Guiying Li

Papers

A survey of remote sensing-based aboveground biomass estimation methods in forest ecosystems

Mapping soil erosion risk in Rondônia, Brazilian Amazonia: using RUSLE, remote sensing and GIS

Measuring the quality of life in city of Indianapolis by integration of remote sensing and census data

Current situation and needs of change detection techniques

Residential population estimation using a remote sensing derived impervious surface approach