Landscape change
Mt. Malindang Rainforestation Project: A Philippine Initiative
<Mt. Malindang Natural Park is one of the Philippine LTER sites. It is protected area and situated on an extinct volcano in the province of Misamis Occidental, Philippines. The natural resources of the park are being threatened by the economic activities of the local people. Deforestation in Mt Malindang has reduced the water supply in the upland and lowland areas of the park. This project was conducted to rehabilitate the degraded forest ecosysytem in the park by replanting indigenous tree species involving the local communities.
Spatial and ecological processes in grassland-to-shrubland transitions in the the Chihuahuan Desert
Grass to shrubland conversions have been widely reported in drylands world wide, but remain poorly understood. Knowledge of ecosystem spatial properties and the environmental constraints underlying landscape pattern is crucial to determining why shrublands have replaced grasslands in some areas and not others as well as predicting where such transitions may be most likely to occur in the future.
Parcel-Based Geovisualization of Southern Appalachia
Parcel-level data provide fine grained information concerning the role of human activity in changing the quantity and quality of ecosystem services. Coweeta’s synoptic sampling program seeks to understand anthropogenic sources of ecosystem change by focusing on a range of distinct landscapes. Comparative views of these landscapes reveal correlations between changes in the flowpaths, habitats, and human communities.
Thinking about the land. Understand perceptions of exurban development in the Swannanoa Valley through a PhotoVoice project (Buncombe County, North Carolina)
Social scientists, policymakers, and the public need to understand how inhabitants of exurbanized areas think about and perceive their land. This study used a combination of the PhotoVoice and participatory GIS method to capture these perceptions. Our results show that while exurban development is commonly discussed as a phenomenon related to “sprawl”, people do not actually perceive development as systemic, but instead focus on development patches that are located in restricted locations.
Natural and Human Impacts on Back-barrier Islands of Georgia
Both natural processes (e.g., erosion, vegetative succession) and human processes (e.g., prehistoric shell deposition, modern clearing) have impacted the structure of back-barrier islands on the coast of Georgia. Both types of processes have occurred continually throughout the past and present. Present-day-back-barrier islands cannot be understood without a thorough knowledge of their landscape history. For a full understanding of coastal ecosystems, they need to be viewed as human ecosystems that are the result of both natural and human processes.