Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Working Landscapes, Sage C. Sutcliffe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Building Bridges: How Collaboration Is Addressing Wildlife-Vehicle Conflicts In Montana's Upper Yellowstone Watershed, Daniel Phelps Anderson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In my first semester of graduate studies at the University of Montana – Fall, 2019 – I was given an assignment from one of my professors to research a “landscape-scale” conflict of my choosing and compose a professional memo that could be sent to key influencers or stakeholders tied to the issue. Naturally, I directed my attention to a community I know and love, the Upper Yellowstone, and a conflict that is ubiquitous across the West: Wildlife-Vehicle Conflicts (WVCs).

In the pages that follow I describe how Yellowstone Safe Passages came to be, who is involved, and the steps we …

Remote Sensing Approaches To Predict Forest Characteristics In Northwest Montana, Ryan P. Rock

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Remote sensing can be utilized by land management organizations to save money and time. Mapping vegetation using either aerial photographs or satellite imagery and the applications for forest management are of particular interest to the Montana Department of Natural Resources. In 2018, the organization began a pilot program to test the incorporation of raster analysis of remotely sensed data into their inventory program and had limited success. This analysis identified two areas of improvement: the selection method of inventory plots and the imagery used for classification and metrics. This study found that selecting inventory plots using a generalized random tessellation …

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 …

Hazardready – A Geographically Based Natural Hazard Education And Preparedness Web Application, Carson C. Macpherson-Krutsky Ms.

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters are inevitable and costly both in terms of lives lost and money spent on recovery. Scientific research on natural hazards is widely shared within the scientific community, but is less often made more widely accessible, as methods or pathways for providing scientific natural hazard information and data in non-technical language are limited. Priorities for imparting hazard information include: 1) scientific accuracy, 2) spatial granularity, 3) integration of information about all relevant hazards, 4) nontechnical content, 5) appropriate preparedness activities, and 6) engagement with existing disaster response and mitigation capabilities. In response to these …

Remaking Nature In Montana: Topophilic Considerations Of Wolves And Wolf Trapping, Andrew Myers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2011, after nearly forty years of federal protection, the gray wolf was removed from the Endangered Species List in Montana and its management entrusted to the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. The implementation of public trapping seasons in 2012 as a method to control wolf populations has further inflamed an already embroiled debate. The purpose of this research was to investigate how the presence of wolves and wolf trapping impacts human attachments to landscapes of “nature” in Montana by focusing on the following questions: What are the public’s social constructions of wolves? What are the public’s social constructions of …

The Timing And Causes Of Illite Formation In The Cretaceous Marias River Shale, Disturbed Belt, Montana, Stephen Gerard Osborn

Geosciences Theses

The clay mineralogy data and K-Ar ages of I/S measured in this study agree with previous work conducted within the Disturbed Belt (Hoffman, 1976) and show that diagenetic I/S formed quickly at several different places in response to thrust sheet burial during the Laramide orogeny. The averages of concordant age values for clay sub-fractions separated from three bentonites of Cretaceous and Jurassic depositional age increase from southeast (53.6 Ma) to northwest (56.7 Ma) along the trend of the Disturbed Belt. This northwestward increase of mean ages of I/S is consistent with a thrust sheet emplacement model for the Disturbed Belt …