Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Concisely, landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity.
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e., unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Forestation is a vital ecological process where forests are established and grown through afforestation and reforestation efforts. Afforestation involves planting trees on previously non-forested lands, while reforestation focuses on replanting trees in areas that were once deforested. This process plays an important role in restoring degraded forests, enhancing ecosystems, promoting carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation.
Adaptive management, also known as adaptive resource management or adaptive environmental assessment and management, is a structured, iterative process of robust decision making in the face of uncertainty, with an aim to reducing uncertainty over time via system monitoring. In this way, decision making simultaneously meets one or more resource management objectives and, either passively or actively, accrues information needed to improve future management. Adaptive management is a tool which should be used not only to change a system, but also to learn about the system. Because adaptive management is based on a learning process, it improves long-run management outcomes. The challenge in using the adaptive management approach lies in finding the correct balance between gaining knowledge to improve management in the future and achieving the best short-term outcome based on current knowledge. This approach has more recently been employed in implementing international development programs.
Environmental resource management or environmental management is the management of the interaction and impact of human societies on the environment. It is not, as the phrase might suggest, the management of the environment itself. Environmental resources management aims to ensure that ecosystem services are protected and maintained for future human generations, and also maintain ecosystem integrity through considering ethical, economic, and scientific (ecological) variables. Environmental resource management tries to identify factors affected by conflicts that rise between meeting needs and protecting resources. It is thus linked to environmental protection, resource management, sustainability, integrated landscape management, natural resource management, fisheries management, forest management, wildlife management, environmental management systems, and others.
Ecological engineering uses ecology and engineering to predict, design, construct or restore, and manage ecosystems that integrate "human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both".
Emergy is the amount of energy consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service. Emergy is a measure of quality differences between different forms of energy. Emergy is an expression of all the energy used in the work processes that generate a product or service in units of one type of energy. Emergy is measured in units of emjoules, a unit referring to the available energy consumed in transformations. Emergy accounts for different forms of energy and resources Each form is generated by transformation processes in nature and each has a different ability to support work in natural and in human systems. The recognition of these quality differences is a key concept.
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems, functioning in healthy relationships, offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as ecosystem services, and are often integral to the provision of food, the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the resilience and productivity of food ecosystems.
An ecosystem model is an abstract, usually mathematical, representation of an ecological system, which is studied to better understand the real system.
Burned area emergency response (BAER) is an emergency risk management reaction to post wildfire conditions that pose risks to human life and property or could further destabilize or degrade the burned lands. Even though wildfires are natural events, the presence of people and man-made structures in and adjacent to the burned area frequently requires continued emergency risk management actions. High severity wildfires pose a continuing flood, debris flow and mudflow risk to people living within and downstream from a burned watershed as well as a potential loss of desirable watershed values.
Landscape-scale conservation is a holistic approach to landscape management, aiming to reconcile the competing objectives of nature conservation and economic activities across a given landscape. Landscape-scale conservation may sometimes be attempted because of climate change. It can be seen as an alternative to site based conservation.
The Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) was established in 2002 to quantify the environmental impact of the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) conservation program. The project focuses on how watersheds are affected. CEAP monitored 14 benchmark watershed sites. The CEAP's vision is to enhance "natural resources and healthier ecosystems through improved conservation effectiveness and better management of agricultural landscapes. The goal is "to improve efficacy of conservations practices and programs by quantifying conservation effects and providing the science and education base needed to enrich conservation planning, implementation, management decisions, and policy."
A Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) is a computer program that simulates shifts in potential vegetation and its associated biogeochemical and hydrological cycles as a response to shifts in climate. DGVMs use time series of climate data and, given constraints of latitude, topography, and soil characteristics, simulate monthly or daily dynamics of ecosystem processes. DGVMs are used most often to simulate the effects of future climate change on natural vegetation and its carbon and water cycles.
The Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) is the South India centre of WII is a national centre for information, education and research in ornithology and natural history in India.
Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystem's function and services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs. Although indigenous communities have employed sustainable ecosystem management approaches implicitly for millennia, ecosystem management emerged explicitly as a formal concept in the 1990s from a growing appreciation of the complexity of ecosystems and of humans' reliance and influence on natural systems.
NetWeaver Developer is a knowledgebase development system. This article
- gives a brief history of the system,
- summarizes key features of the software,
- is a bit of a primer, describing basic attributes of a NetWeaver knowledgebase, and
- provides secondary references that independently document some of the NetWeaver applications developed since the late 1980s.
The LANDFIRE Program produces geo-spatial products and databases covering the United States. LANDFIRE is a partnership between the wildland fire management programs of the United States Department of Interior, the USDA Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy. LANDFIRE was chartered to create a nationally complete, comprehensive, and consistent set of products that support cross-country planning, and fire and natural resource management. This multi-partner Program produces consistent, comprehensive, geospatial data and databases that describe vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire regimes across the United States and insular areas. LANDFIRE's mission is to provide agency leaders and managers with a common "all-lands" data set of vegetation and wildland fire/fuels information for strategic fire and resource management planning and analysis.
i-Tree is a collection of urban and rural forestry analysis and benefits assessment tools. It was designed and developed by the United States Forest Service to quantify and value ecosystem services provided by trees including pollution removal, carbon sequestration, avoided carbon emissions, avoided stormwater runoff, and more. i-Tree provides baseline data so that the growth of trees can be followed over time, and is used for planning purposes. Different tools within the i-Tree Suite use different types of inputs and provide different kinds of reports; some tools use a 'bottom up' approach based on tree inventories on the ground, while other tools use a 'top down' approach based on remote sensing data. i-Tree is peer-reviewed and has a process of ongoing collaboration to improve it.
Ponderosa pine forest is a plant association and plant community dominated by ponderosa pine and found in western North America. It is found from the British Columbia to Durango, Mexico. In the south and east, ponderosa pine forest is the climax forest, while in the more northern part of its range, it can transition to Douglas-fir or grand fir, or white fir forests. Understory species depends on location. Fire suppression has led to insect outbreaks in ponderosa pine forests.
Nature-based solutions is the sustainable management and use of natural features and processes to tackle socio-environmental issues. These issues include for example climate change, water security, food security, preservation of biodiversity, and disaster risk reduction. Through the use of NBS healthy, resilient, and diverse ecosystems can provide solutions for the benefit of both societies and overall biodiversity. The 2019 UN Climate Action Summit highlighted nature-based solutions as an effective method to combat climate change. For example, NBS in the context of climate action can include natural flood management, restoring natural coastal defences, providing local cooling, restoring natural fire regimes.