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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Environmental Sciences

Western Washington University

Series

GIS

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Why Georeferencing Matters: Introducing A Practical Protocol To Prepare Species Occurrence Records For Spatial Analysis, Trevor D.S. Bloom, Aquila Flower, Eric G. Dechaine Jan 2018

Why Georeferencing Matters: Introducing A Practical Protocol To Prepare Species Occurrence Records For Spatial Analysis, Trevor D.S. Bloom, Aquila Flower, Eric G. Dechaine

Environmental Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are widely used to understand environmental controls on species’ ranges and to forecast species range shifts in response to climatic changes. The quality of input data is crucial determinant of the model’s accuracy. While museum records can be useful sources of presence data for many species, they do not always include accurate geographic coordinates. Therefore, actual locations must be verified through the process of georeferencing. We present a practical, standardized manual georeferencing method (the Spatial Analysis Georeferencing Accuracy (SAGA) protocol) to classify the spatial resolution of museum records specifically for building improved SDMs. We used the …


A New Method Comparing Snowmelt Timing With Annual Area Burned, Donal S. O'Leary Iii, Trevor D. Bloom, Jacob C. Smith, Christopher R. Zemp, Michael J. Medler Jan 2016

A New Method Comparing Snowmelt Timing With Annual Area Burned, Donal S. O'Leary Iii, Trevor D. Bloom, Jacob C. Smith, Christopher R. Zemp, Michael J. Medler

Environmental Studies Faculty and Staff Publications

The interactions between climate and wildland fire are complex. To better understand these interactions, we used ArcMap 10.2.2 to examine the relationships between early spring snowmelt and total annual area burned within a defined region of the Rocky Mountains of the western United States. Our research methods used Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) fire perimeter data and weekly snow extent provided by the Rutgers Global Snow Lab analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) daily snow maps. Our results indicated a significant correlation between early spring snowmelt and total annual area burned (P = 0.0497), providing further evidence …