The scarred landscape, long denuded of its trees by slash and burn farmers, eventually gave way to patches of natural forest and then sandy plains with extraordinary rock formations.
Dr. Ted J. Case, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego, has spent much of his career studying population changes among reptiles on islands and in isolated patches of natural habitat like parks in suburban California.
But the view from the air can offer a more vivid picture, exposing one checkerboard after another, with patches of natural forest interspersed by tracts razed to the bare earth, and by others whose uniform green was a telltale sign of a the planting of a single variety of tree.
There are the patches of natural light shimmering on the curved white walls and polished concrete floors down the hall ahead and, farther along, brief flashes of an outdoor patio's blond concrete, the green of a yard and the faraway dark blue ocean.
As explorers through this lush book, we follow more or less Meyerowitz's actual route throughout the city, moving from the Bronx (where Meyerowitz grew up) to Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and finally Staten Island, stopping along the way to discover patches of natural splendor hidden within urban spaces: forests and meadows, marshes and shorelines.
In one direction is the mill of Indah Kiat Pulp and Paper, a subsidiary of APP, part of the Sinar Mas group; in the other that of APRIL, Sumatra's other big pulp-and-paper producer.Off the main road, small patches of "natural" forest survive alongside the swathe of broad sandy corridor cut by a logging company.
As large patches of natural vegetation decrease, habitat for jaguar preys also decrease.
Small patches of natural vegetation and locations in which natural and cultivated lands where interspersed showed lower richness and diversity of raptors than large patches.
In Montréal, natural areas have a total connectivity value of 581.7 ha, the majority of which exists between, rather than within, patches of natural area.
Small patches of natural or semi-natural habitat have an important role in the conservation of biodiversity in human-dominated environments.
Based on the results, we emphasize the importance of protecting and managing remnant strips or patches of natural and semi-natural wetland habitats in the Jordan Valley.
