ALBERT

Description: Current literature suggests that grassland degradation occurs in areas with poor soil conditions or noticeable environmental changes and is often a result of overgrazing or human disturbances. However, these views are questioned in our analyses. Based on the analysis of satellite vegetation maps from 1984, 1998, and 2004 for the Xilin River Basin, Inner Mongolia, China, and binary logistic regression (BLR) analysis, we observe the following: (1) grassland degradation is positively correlated with the growth density of climax communities; (2) our findings do not support a common notion that a decrease of biological productivity is a direct indicator of grassland degradation; (3) a causal relationship between grazing intensity and grassland degradation was not found; (4) degradation severity increased steadily towards roads but showed different trends near human settlements. This study found complex relationships between vegetation degradation and various microhabitat conditions, for example, elevation, slope, aspect, and proximity to water.

Description: Urban society is undergoing as profound a spatial transformation as that associated with the emergence of the industrial city two centuries ago. To describe and measure this transition, we introduce a new theory based on the concept that large-scale, complex systems composed of many interacting elements, show a surprising degree of resilience to change, holding themselves at critical levels for long periods until conditions emerge which move the system, often abruptly, to a new threshold. This theory is called ‘self-organized criticality’; it is consistent with systems in which global patterns emerge from local action which is the hallmark of self-organization, and it is consistent with developments in system dynamics and their morphology which find expression in fractal geometry and weak chaos theory. We illustrate the theory using a unique space–time series of urban development for Buffalo, Western New York, which contains the locations of over one quarter of a million sites coded by their year of construction and dating back to 1773, some 60 years before the city began to develop. We measure the emergence and growth of the city using urban density functions from which measures of fractal dimension are used to construct growth paths of the way the city has grown to fill its region. These phase portraits suggest the existence of transitions between the frontier, the settled agricultural region, the centralized industrial city and the decentralized postindustrial city, and our analysis reveals that Buffalo has maintained itself at a critical threshold since the emergence of the automobile city some 70 years ago. Our implied speculation is: how long will this kind of urban form be maintained in the face of seemingly unstoppable technological change?