Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Clonal Plants' Traits And Responses Following Fire Disturbance In Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems In The Colorado Front Range, Raymond Erskine
Clonal Plants' Traits And Responses Following Fire Disturbance In Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems In The Colorado Front Range, Raymond Erskine
Master's Theses
Mountain ecosystems are currently experiencing increasing impacts of disturbances (e.g., wildfire) due to global changes in climate and land use, leading to significant changes in vegetation composition and landscape dynamics. Clonal plants, characterized by their vegetative reproduction strategies, offer a range of ecologically important traits to cope with disturbances. However, clonality is often excluded in studies of post-fire vegetation dynamics in mountain ecosystems, and our knowledge of the ability of clonal plants to respond to differing disturbance regimes is limited. Therefore, I examined the response of understory vegetation following fire disturbance in burned and unburned ponderosa pine stands of the …
Automated Tree Mortality Detection Using Ubiquitously Available Public Data, Michael T. Huggins
Automated Tree Mortality Detection Using Ubiquitously Available Public Data, Michael T. Huggins
Master's Theses
Understanding the dynamic interplay between fire severity, topography, and tree mortality, is crucial for predicting future forest dynamics and enhancing resilience against climate change-induced wildfire regimes. This thesis develops a multi-sensor approach for automated estimation of tree mortality, then applies it to examine trends in tree mortality over a six-year period across a fire affected study site in the Trinity River basin in Northern California. The Random Forest model uses publicly available USGS 3D Elevation Program Lidar (3DEP) and NAIP imagery as inputs and is likely to be easily adaptable to other landscapes. The model had a Receiver Operating Characteristic …