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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Confronting The Challenges Of Whale Avoidance By Large Vessels To Reduce Collision Risk: A Quantitative Approach, Jennifer E. Helm
Confronting The Challenges Of Whale Avoidance By Large Vessels To Reduce Collision Risk: A Quantitative Approach, Jennifer E. Helm
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Disturbance of wildlife by human transportation infrastructure is ubiquitous. This type of human-wildlife conflict has the potential to negatively impact wildlife population growth rates, especially for at-risk species like large whales. While many whale populations are rebounding as a result of a moratorium on commercial whaling, increasing ship traffic constitutes a significant threat to whale conservation efforts in the form of ship-whale collisions (“ship strikes”). Ship strike avoidance is difficult because vessel operators can only see whales when they are breaking the surface of the water, or “available for detection,” and even then, they will only see them a fraction …
Understanding Patterns And Drivers Of Alaskan Fire-Regime Variability Across Spatial And Temporal Scales, Tyler J. Hoecker
Understanding Patterns And Drivers Of Alaskan Fire-Regime Variability Across Spatial And Temporal Scales, Tyler J. Hoecker
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Boreal forest and tundra ecosystems are globally important because the mobilization of large carbon stocks, and changes in energy balance could act as positive feedbacks to ongoing climate warming. In Alaska, wildfire is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function, and therefore fire strongly determines the feedbacks between high-latitude ecosystems and the larger Earth system. The paleoecological record from Alaska reveals the sensitivity of fire regimes to climatic and vegetation change over centennial to millennial time scales, highlighting increased burning with warming and/or increased landscape flammability associated with large-scale vegetation changes. This thesis focuses on two studies aimed at …