Treesearch

Monitoring and evaluating ecological quality and changes are crucial for policy formulation to guide ecosystem management and socioeconomic sustainable development. However, evaluation of ecological quality is still very challenging due to difficulties in determination of its associated indicators and weights. This paper proposes supporting, providing and regulating ecosystems services-based indicators to describe ecological quality, and applies a Projection Pursuit Model to eliminate redundant indicators and objectively determine weights for an ecological quality index (EQI) on a regional...

Fire is a common ecosystem process in forests and grasslands worldwide. Increasingly, ignitions are controlled by human activities either through suppression of wildfires or intentional ignition of prescribed fires. The southeastern United States leads the nation in prescribed fire, burning ca. 80% of the country’s extent annually. The COVID-19 pandemic radically changed human behavior as workplaces implemented social-distancing guidelines and provided an opportunity to evaluate relationships between humans and fire as fire management plans were postponed or cancelled. Using active fire...

The ecosystem services provided by forests are under threat as wildfire frequency and severity increase throughout the western US. Severe wildfire can change physical environments and biogeochemical processes in watersheds with lasting effects on watershed nutrient cycling. For example, nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N) export often increases following wildfire and can remain elevated for decades in severely burned watersheds. In this study, we investigated the effects of wildfire on stream biotic processing and watershed nutrient balance following two wildfires that burned along the Colorado Front...

Landscape fire is a widespread, somewhat unpredictable phenomena that plays an important part in Earth’s biogeochemical cycling. In many biomes worldwide fire also provides multiple ecological benefits, but in certain circumstances can also pose a risk to life and infrastructure, lead to net increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and to degradation in air quality and consequently human health. Accurate, timely and frequently updated information on landscape fire activity is essential to improve our understanding of the drivers and impacts of this form of biomass burning,...

The co-occurrence of felid species in Southeast Asia provides an unusual opportunity to investigate guild structure and the factors controlling it. Using camera-trap data, we quantified the space use, temporal activity, and multi-dimensional niche overlap of the tiger, clouded leopard, Asiatic golden cat, marbled cat, and leopard cat in the Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary, Myanmar. We hypothesised that the spatio-temporal behaviour of smaller cats would reflect the avoidance of the larger cats, and similar-sized guild members would partition their niches in space or time to reduce resource...

Understanding the spatial structure of genetic diversity provides insights into a populations’ genetic status and enables assessment of its capacity to counteract the effects of genetic drift. Such knowledge is particularly scarce for the snow leopard, a conservation flagship species of Central Asia mountains. Focusing on a snow leopard population in the Qilian mountains of Gansu Province, China, we characterised the spatial genetic patterns by incorporating spatially explicit indices of diversity and multivariate analyses, based on different inertia levels of Principal Component Analysis...

This paper presents a multivariate textual analysis of more than 1300 papers on entropy in ecology. There are six main insights that emerged. First, there is a large body of literature that has addressed some aspect of entropy in ecology, most of which has been published in the last 5-10 years. Second, the vast majority of these papers focus on species distribution, species richness, relative abundance or trophic structure and not landscape-scale patterns or processes, pe se. Third, there have been few papers addressing landscape-level questions related to entropy. Fourth, the quantitative...

There has been a recent surge of interest in theory and methods for calculating the entropy of landscape patterns, but relatively little is known about the thermodynamic consistency of these approaches. I posit that for any of these methods to be fully thermodynamically consistent, they must meet three conditions. First, the computed entropies must lie along the theoretical distribution of entropies as a function of total edge length, which Cushman showed was a parabolic function following from the fact that there is a normal distribution of permuted edge lengths, the entropy is the...

Several methods have been recently proposed to calculate configurational entropy, based on Boltzmann entropy. Some of these methods appear to be fully thermodynamically consistent in their application to landscape patch mosaics, but none have been shown to be fully generalizable to all kinds of landscape patterns, such as point patterns, surfaces, and patch mosaics. The goal of this paper is to evaluate if the direct application of the Boltzmann relation is fully generalizable to surfaces, point patterns, and landscape mosaics. I simulated surfaces and point patterns with a fractal neutral...

Globally, smoke from landscape fires - including wildland fire (encompassing wildfires and prescribed fires), agricultural burning, tropical deforestation fires, peat fires, and grass fires - is estimated to cause 339,000 deaths annually (1). Epidemiological, clinical, animal, and cellular studies support a positive association between short-term exposure to wildland fire smoke and premature death and respiratory disease, namely exacerbation of asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia (2-4). Emerging data suggest that exposure to wildland fire smoke also increases the risk of clinical cardiovascul...