Day: June 22, 2010

A Rapid Biodiversity Assessment Methodology Tested on Intertidal Rocky Shores

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, Volume 20, Issue 4, Date: June 2010, Pages: 452-463

Timothy D. O’hara, Prue F. E. Addison, Ruth Gazzard, Trudy L. Costa, and Jacqueline B. Pocklington

“Conservation managers require biodiversity assessment tools to estimate the impact of human activities on biodiversity and to prioritize resources for habitat protection or restoration. Large-scale programs have been developed for freshwater ecosystems which grade sites by comparing measured versus expected species richness. These models have been applied successfully to habitats that suffer from systemic pressures, such as poor water quality. However, pressures in other habitats, such as rocky intertidal shores, are known to induce more subtle changes in community composition.

“This paper tests a biodiversity assessment methodology that uses the ANOSIM R statistic to quantify the biological dissimilarity between a site being assessed and a series of reference sites selected on the basis of their similar environmental profile. Sites with high R values for assemblage composition have an anomalous assemblage for their environmental profile and are potentially disturbed.

“This methodology successfully identified moderate to heavily perturbed sites in a pilot study on 65 rocky intertidal sites in south-eastern Australia. In general, measures based on percentage cover (flora and sessile invertebrates) were more sensitive than abundance (fauna). ”

High-resolution Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques for Geobase Data Supporting Archaeological Surveys: A Case Study of Ancient Doliche, Southeast Turkey

/ Matt Artz

Geoarchaeology, Volume 25, Issue 3, May/June 2010, Pages 352-374

Torsten Prinz, Benedikt Lasar, and Karl Peter Krüger

“The detection, surveying, and analysis of ancient settlement structures using remote sensing techniques offer a unique opportunity to quickly map the locations of archaeological objects in a relatively short time. High-resolution images contribute information to the documentation and spatial relation of these objects, especially if Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Web-based applications are used. The aim of this study was to assess the potential use of satellite data and aerial imagesacquired by a remote-controlled balloon to generate geospatial data with a range of resolutions and information depths. The study area was Doliche, in the landscape of ancient Commagene (Turkey), where conventional flight campaigns are impossible or strongly restricted. Recently generated data sets (i.e., topographic maps, ortho-images, terrain models) were combined with field observations to derive ancient and modern landscape patterns and their possible relation to an assumed ancient procession road between the village Doliche (Dülük) and the nearby sanctuary of theRoman divinity Iupiter Dolichenus.”

Conditional Simulation of USLE/RUSLE Soil Erodibility Factor by Geostatistics in a Mediterranean Catchment, Turkey

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

Environmental Earth Sciences, 2010, vol. 60, no6, pp. 1179-1187

BASKAN Oguz; CEBEL Hicrettin; AKGUL Suat; and ERPUL Gunay

“Soil erosion is a major environmental problem that threatens the sustainability and productivity of agricultural areas. Assessment and mapping of soil erosion are extremely important in the management and conservation of natural resources. The universal soil loss equation (USLE/RUSLE) is an erosion model that predicts soil loss as a function of soil erodibility (K-factor), as well as topographic, rainfall, cover, and management factors. The traditional approach assumes that one soil erodibility value represents the entire area of each soil series. Therefore, that approach does not account for spatial variability of soil series. This study was carried out to evaluate the use of the sequential Gaussian simulation (SGS) for mapping soil erodibility factor of the USLE/RUSLE methodology. Five hundred and forty-four surface soil samples (0―20 cm) were collected from the study area to determine the soil erodibility. A simulation procedure was carried out on 300 realizations, and histogram and semivariogram of the simulation were compared to the observed values. The results showed that the summary statistics, histogram, and semivariogram of the simulation results were close to the observed values. In contrary to the traditional approach and kriging, 95% confidence interval of the simulated realizations was formed in order to determine uncertainty standard deviation map, and the uncertainty was explained numerically. The SGS produced a more reliable soil erodibility map and it can be more successfully used for monitoring and improving effective strategies to prevent erosion hazards especially to improve site specific management plans.”