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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Alternative Sampling And Analysis Methods For Digital Soil Mapping In Southwestern Utah, Colby W. Brungard
Alternative Sampling And Analysis Methods For Digital Soil Mapping In Southwestern Utah, Colby W. Brungard
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Digital soil mapping (DSM) relies on quantitative relationships between easily measured environmental covariates and field and laboratory data. We applied innovative sampling and inference techniques to predict the distribution of soil properties, soil attributes, taxonomic classes, and dominant vegetation across a 30,000-ha complex Great Basin landscape in southwestern Utah. This arid rangeland was characterized by rugged topography, diverse vegetation, and intricate geology. Environmental covariates calculated from digital elevation models (DEM) and spectral satellite data were used to represent factors controlling soil development and distribution. We investigated optimal sample size and sampled the environmental covariates using conditioned Latin Hypercube Sampling (cLHS). …
Predicting The Growth Potential Of A Shallow, Warm-Water Sport Fishery: A Spatially Explicit Bioenergetics Approach, Samuel Kirk Dahle
Predicting The Growth Potential Of A Shallow, Warm-Water Sport Fishery: A Spatially Explicit Bioenergetics Approach, Samuel Kirk Dahle
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Capturing the range of fish consumption and growth potential of large, heterogeneous lentic systems can be challenging due to strong gradients in productivity, the diversity of habits types present, and in some cases, site-specific water quality issues. Cutler Reservoir (Utah, USA) displays a high degree of spatial and temporal variation in physical conditions and potential water quality limitations for fish, including high summertime water temperature and large, diel fluctuations in dissolved oxygen concentrations. The combination of bioenergetics modeling and GIS spatial analysis offers a promising interface for quantifying the fish consumptive and growth potential across a spatially and temporally heterogeneous …
Watershed-Scale Analysis Of Riparian Buffer Function, Molly Van Appledorn
Watershed-Scale Analysis Of Riparian Buffer Function, Molly Van Appledorn
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
The ability of riparian buffers to filter undesirable nutrients from upland sources has long been recognized as an important ecosystem service for maintaining or improving water quality, and as a result, many land management strategies have been built around the preservation or restoration of buffer zones. Newly derived flow-path metrics have shown great promise as a way to assess riparian buffer function at the watershed scale but a thorough investigation of metric performance was necessary. The goals of this study were to: 1) test the independence of flow-path metrics from traditional metrics using a spatially extensive, independent sample of watersheds, …