Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Modeling Hydrologic Impacts Of Tribal Water Rights Quantification And Settlement On The Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, Jordan Andrew Jimmie Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 …


Using Satellite Observations Of Soil Moisture To Improve Modeling Of Terrestrial Water Cycles, Colin W. Brust Jan 2020

Using Satellite Observations Of Soil Moisture To Improve Modeling Of Terrestrial Water Cycles, Colin W. Brust

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) describes the flux of water from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere, calculated as the sum of evaporation from soil and leaf surfaces, and transpiration through plant stomata. ET is the largest terrestrial water flux, returning over half of the precipitation that falls on land back to the atmosphere, annually. Additionally, ET plays a key role in Earth’s carbon, water, and energy cycles, linking them together via the movement of water and CO2 through plant stomata. Because of its important role in these Earth system processes, it is essential that existing methods of measuring and modeling …


Water For Fish And Farms: An Examination Of Instream Flow Programs In Montana Using Spatially-Explicit Water Rights Data, Anna Leigh Crockett Jan 2020

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 …