Populated cities tend to have less, more fragmented, less connected vegetation with a centre of the city with low vegetation cover.
The accurate mapping of small, often fragmented and linear vegetation patches is of key importance for natural resource management because of their ecological significance.
The Burren in County Clare, western Ireland is a glaciated karstic landscape with a fragmented soil and vegetation cover on a predominantly limestone substrate.
The BDM approach is a promising new method in biome mapping, and could be particularly useful for mapping poorly known, fragmented, or degraded vegetation.
Thus, our work indicates that the location and size of patches, together with disturbances, largely determine the structure of the vegetation in fragmented landscapes.
Thus, despite its fragmented nature, the riparian vegetation on the Vaal still supports an important component of avian diversity, and a landscape-level approach is required to manage this relatively rich, arid-land, river.
Anthropogenic fragmentation poses additional challenges: vegetation cover is becoming increasingly fragmented due to human disturbance, and habitat degradation is leading to changes in vegetation structure even in biomes previously deemed structurally homogeneous.
