The upslope movement of vegetation has been observed in association with warming temperatures and is especially evident in ecotones-the transition zones between vegetation types. Global climate change is predicted to cause widespread shifts in the distribution and composition of forests, particularly in mountain environments where climate exerts strong controls on tree community arrangement. Focusing on European, temperate agricultural landscapes, we outline three areas of research and management that together demonstrate how TZ might be used to facilitate an integrated landscape approach: (i) plant and animal species' use and response to boundaries and the resulting effects on yield, for a deeper understanding of how landscape structure shapes quantity and quality of TZ (ii) local knowledge on field or patch-level management and its interactions with biodiversity and yield in TZ, and (iii) conflict prevention and collaborative management across land-use boundaries. Biodiversity patterns in TZ have been extensively studied, but their relationship to yield patterns and social-ecological dimensions has been largely neglected.
Transition zones (TZ) have previously been defined as areas where two adjacent fields or patches interact, and so they occur abundantly throughout agricultural landscapes. Although there is an increasing tendency to move away from this dichotomy in theory, the tendency is perpetuated by the spatially explicit approaches used in research and management practice. Biodiversity conservation and agricultural production have been largely framed as separate goals for landscapes in the discourse on land use. Finally, we conclude that ecotones extraction from UAS images would also provide the possibility to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire ecological process of agricultural abandoned land restoration through continuous investigation and monitoring.ġ. Through transect-based analysis at three transects, the overall accuracy of the width of UAS-derived delineation is greater than 70%, and the detection accuracy for the occurrence location is 100%. Furthermore, we assess the accuracy of the ecotones’ delineation based on the transects method with the previous situ work we carried out and quantify the landscape structure using common landscape metrics to describe its spatial and geometric characteristics. A landscape pattern identified with ecotones and other small biotopes at the fine scale. Afterward, according to the difference of plant community height between abandoned farmland ecosystem and forest ecosystem, the ecotones are delineated. To achieve these objectives, a canopy height model (CHM) is constructed based on a UAS-photogrammetric-derived point cloud, which is derived from the digital surface model (DSM) minus the digital terrain model (DTM). This study aims to extract forest-agriculture ecotones by RGB ultrahigh-resolution images from a small UAS and quantify the small biotopes in 3D space. Acquiring high spatial resolution imagery from a small, unmanned aircraft system (UAS) provides new opportunities for studying ecotones at a small scale. However, accurately delineating ecotones is still a big challenge for vegetation and landscape ecologists. The ‘Returning Farmland to Forest Program’ (RFFP) in China has become an essential factor in land cover changes and forest transition, especially in terms of the ecological processes between two adjacent ecosystems. (2) more research into novel techniques, including multi-dimensional data and time series, is needed in view of local and
That (1) a shift in focus from one-dimensional to two-dimensional techniques in ecotone characterization is desirable and (Ecotones: the role of landscape boundaries in the managementĪnd restoration of changing environments, 1991) to “A multi-dimensional environmentally stochastic interaction zone betweenĮcological systems with characteristics defined in space and time, and by the strength of the interaction”. Therefore adapted and extended the definition from Holland etal. To avoid furtherĬonfusion, a unique definition of the term “ecotone” should be agreed upon, based upon a set of general characteristics. Use of terms and definitions can be a source of confusion when interpreting and comparing different studies. We see a needįor semantic uniformity with regard to the term and the definition of “the ecotone”, as the variable and the non-exclusive We summarize the most important techniquesĪnd highlight the discrepancies between the definitions and their scientific application in vegetation ecology.
The terms and definitions of ecotone research in vegetation ecology are reviewed. In this review paper, we highlight some of the trends and issues that have dominated ecotone research over the decade of 1996–2006.
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