Vegetation Dynamics Revealed by Remote Sensing and Its Feedback to Regional and Global Climate

This book focuses on some significant progress in vegetation dynamics and their response to climate change revealed by remote sensing data. The development of satellite remote sensing and its derived products offer fantastic opportunities to investigate vegetation changes and their feedback to regional and global climate systems. Special attention is given in the book to vegetation changes and their drivers, the effects of extreme climate events on vegetation, land surface albedo associated with vegetation changes, plant fingerprints, and vegetation dynamics in climate modeling

Applications of Remote Sensing Data in Mapping of Forest Growing Stock and Biomass

This Special Issue (SI), entitled "Applications of Remote Sensing Data in Mapping of Forest Growing Stock and Biomass”, resulted from 13 peer-reviewed papers dedicated to Forestry and Biomass mapping, characterization and accounting. The papers' authors presented improvements in Remote Sensing processing techniques on satellite images, drone-acquired images and LiDAR images, both aerial and terrestrial. Regarding the images’ classification models, all authors presented supervised methods, such as Random Forest, complemented by GIS routines and biophysical variables measured on the field, which were properly georeferenced. The achieved results enable the statement that remote imagery could be successfully used as a data source for regression analysis and formulation and, in this way, used in forestry actions such as canopy structure analysis and mapping, or to estimate biomass. This collection of papers, presented in the form of a book, brings together 13 articles covering various forest issues and issues in forest biomass calculation, constituting an important work manual for those who use mixed GIS and RS techniques

The GEO Handbook on Biodiversity Observation Networks

biodiversity; conservation; ecosystem

Modeling of Species Distribution and Biodiversity in Forests

Understanding the patterns of biodiversity and their relationship with environmental gradients is a key issue in ecological research and conservation in forests. Several environmental factors can influence species distributions in these complex ecosystems. It is therefore important to distinguish the effects of natural factors from the anthropogenic ones (e.g., environmental pollution, climate change, and forest management) by adopting reliable models able to predict future scenarios of species distribution. In the last 20 years, the use of statistical tools, such as Species Distribution Models (SDM) or Ecological Niche Models (ENM), allowed researchers to make great strides in the subject, with hundreds of scientific research works in this field. This book collects several research articles where these methodological approaches are the starting point to deepen the knowledge in many timely and emerging topics in forest ecosystems around the world, from Eurasia to America