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Natural Resources Management and Policy
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
- Keyword
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- Business Emergy Analysis and Business Life Cycle Assessment (1)
- Conservation Corridor (1)
- Conservation Easements (1)
- Decision analysis (1)
- Fire management (1)
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- Flathead Indian Irrigation Project (1)
- Flathead Reservation (1)
- Forage (1)
- Forest management (1)
- Forest structure (1)
- Grizzly Bears (1)
- HAWQS (1)
- Hydrologic modeling (1)
- Industrial Ecological Modeling (1)
- Industrial Ecology (1)
- Instream flow (1)
- Irrigation (1)
- Least Cost Pathway (1)
- Machine learning (1)
- Mapping (1)
- Mixed-conifer forest (1)
- Mixed-severity fire regime (1)
- Montana (1)
- Mule deer (1)
- Net-zero or Net-positive Business (1)
- Neural networks (1)
- Nutrition (1)
- Regenerative Business (1)
- Resource selection (1)
- SWAT (1)
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Managing Forest Disturbances: Effects On Mule Deer And Plant Communities In Montana's Northern Forests, Teagan Ann Hayes
Managing Forest Disturbances: Effects On Mule Deer And Plant Communities In Montana's Northern Forests, Teagan Ann Hayes
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) are frequently the focus of population and habitat management in the western United States. Land and wildlife managers use disturbance to reset forests to earlier successional stages and improve the quality and quantity of forage available to mule deer. However, the effects of management practices on nutrition and selection vary widely, so the implementation of management practices raises ecological as well as management-related concerns. This work investigated how disturbance from wildfire, prescribed fire, and timber harvest influences the spatial and temporal distribution of nutritional resources in mule deer summer range, and therefore, how the …
Prioritizing Parcels For Conservation Easements Using Least-Cost Path Analyses Of Land Ownership: Case Study Within Theorized Grizzly Bear Migration Corridors Of Western Montana, Joseph H. Offer
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
As the world’s human population has grown and converted large natural habitats to human dominated landscapes, the planet’s biodiversity has decreased. To combat the loss of biodiversity from human development, many conservation professionals champion the concept of conservation corridors between intact habitats. Conservation corridors, made up of protected land, serve as a connection for wildlife populations to intermix genetics and, subsequently, help reduce the risk of extinction. The ideal geographic location of corridors is generally determined through geographic information system modeling using biophysical conditions and theorized animal movement. However, the resulting corridors are often expansive and protecting entire corridors is …
Understanding And Measuring Net Positive Business Strategies, Luke Ruffner Robinson
Understanding And Measuring Net Positive Business Strategies, Luke Ruffner Robinson
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Despite their attempts to mitigate ecological impacts through sustainability initiatives, businesses are a major cause of the world's ecological problems. Some progressive businesses are attempting to move beyond “net zero” in terms of achieving neutral environmental impacts and instead are now pursuing a goal of net positive. Net positive refers to the idea that business activities could contribute value-added benefits to earth’s ecological systems, for example, by using technologies that sequester and store carbon. However, except for a handful of high-profile corporate case studies, little is known about how companies are developing their strategies to become net positive and …
Modeling Hydrologic Impacts Of Tribal Water Rights Quantification And Settlement On The Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, Jordan Andrew Jimmie
Modeling Hydrologic Impacts Of Tribal Water Rights Quantification And Settlement On The Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, Jordan Andrew Jimmie
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Reservation are a federally-recognized group of tribes (Kootenai, Salish, and Pend d’Oreille) located in western Montana. On the reservation lies the expansive Flathead Indian Irrigation Project (FIIP), which supplies irrigation water to approximately 127,000 acres of tribal and non-tribal agricultural land. The 1904 Flathead Allotment Act opened “surplus” land to non-native homesteaders without tribal consent, initiating the land ownership fragmentation observed on the reservation today. This legacy, combined with historically unquantified tribal reserved water rights and the antiquated state of the FIIP infrastructure, including water losses from unlined earthen canals, …
A Deep Learning Approach To Mapping Irrigation: U-Net Irrmapper, Thomas Henry Colligan Iv
A Deep Learning Approach To Mapping Irrigation: U-Net Irrmapper, Thomas Henry Colligan Iv
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Accurate maps of irrigation are essential for understanding and managing water resources in light of a warming climate. We present a new method for mapping irrigation and apply it to the state of Montana over the years 2000-2019. The method is based on an ensemble of convolutional neural networks that only rely on raw Landsat surface reflectance data. The ensemble of networks method learns to mask clouds and ignore Landsat 7 scan-line failures without supervision, reducing the need for preprocessing data or feature engineering. Unlike other approaches to mapping irrigation, the method doesn't use other mapping products like the Cropland …
Water For Fish And Farms: An Examination Of Instream Flow Programs In Montana Using Spatially-Explicit Water Rights Data, Anna Leigh Crockett
Water For Fish And Farms: An Examination Of Instream Flow Programs In Montana Using Spatially-Explicit Water Rights Data, Anna Leigh Crockett
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
The state-level institutions governing water use in the western United States have increasingly come under pressure and scrutiny related to their inability to navigate water use conflicts in recent decades. Rapid population growth and shifting public values towards leaving water instream for recreational and environmental purposes pose challenges to Montana water supplies which are predominantly allocated for irrigated agriculture. Additionally, while water scarcity and unpredictable availability are not new dilemmas in Montana, the rate at which climate change is driving shifts in the distribution, timing, and availability of water supplies is unprecedented. Current water policies may not be nimble enough …
Learning From Wilderness Fire: Restoring Landscape Scale Patterns And Processes, Julia Kittleson Berkey
Learning From Wilderness Fire: Restoring Landscape Scale Patterns And Processes, Julia Kittleson Berkey
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Wilderness areas, because they are managed to be “untrammeled by man,” often offer the best approximation of intact, undisturbed ecological patterns and processes. In the case of wildland fire, this means that wilderness areas often provide the only landscapes where fire has been managed to play an active, ecosystem role. As a result, these wilderness areas offer unique lessons both in terms of wildland fire management as well as the ecological consequences that result from this management approach. For these reasons, an in-depth history of fire management in the wilderness areas of the Northern Rocky Mountains is provided to highlight …