Other Earth Sciences Commons^™

A Sense Of Scale: Mapping Exotic Annual Grasses With Satellite Imagery Across A Landscape And Quantifying Their Biomass At A Plot Level With Structure-From-Motion In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem, Monica Vermillion

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The native vegetation communities in the sagebrush steppe, a semi-arid ecosystem type, are under threat from exotic annual grasses. Exotic annual grasses increase fire severity and frequency, decrease biodiversity, and reduce soil carbon storage amongst other ecosystem services. The invasion of exotic annual grasses is causing detrimental impacts to land use by eliminating forage for livestock and creating a huge economic cost from fire control and post-fire restoration. To combat invasion, land managers need to know what exotic annual grasses are present, where they are invading, and estimates of their biomass. Mapping exotic annual grasses is challenging because many areas …

Applications Of Continuous Snowpack Temperature Monitoring, Peter J. Youngblood

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Predicting metamorphism within seasonal snowpacks is critical for avalanche forecasting and runoff timing as it relates to water supply management. Snowpack temperature gradients play a key role in snow metamorphism, and their magnitude controls how snow strength changes; therefore, they are of interest to avalanche forecasters. Before major melt, the snowpack must warm to isothermal conditions at 0°C. Measuring this transition from warming to the ripening phase could help improve our current models for runoff timing. Measuring snowpack temperature gradients is currently a non-automated process that requires disturbance of the snow profile, and only gives a snapshot in time of …

Informing Field Management Decisions To Enhance Alfalfa Seed Production Using Remote Sensing, Thomas V. Van Der Weide

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The development rate of alfalfa seed crop depends on both environmental conditions and management decisions. Crop management decisions, such as determining when to release pollinators to optimize pollination, can be informed by the identification of plant development stages from remote sensing data. I first identify what electromagnetic wavelengths are sensitive to alfalfa plant development stages using hyperspectral data. A Random Forest regression is used to determine the best Vegetation Index (VI) to monitor how much of the plant is covered in flower. The results indicate that Blue, Green, and Near-Infrared are the important electromagnetic wavelengths for the VI. Imagery collected …

Characterizing Dryland Ecosystems Using Remote Sensing And Dynamic Global Vegetation Modeling, Abdolhamid Dashtiahangar

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Drylands include all terrestrial regions where the production of crops, forage, wood and other ecosystem services are limited by water. These ecosystems cover approximately 40% of the earth terrestrial surface and accommodate more than 2 billion people (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Moreover, the interannual variability of the global carbon budget is strongly regulated by vegetation dynamics in drylands. Understanding the dynamics of such ecosystems is significant for assessing the potential for and impacts of natural or anthropogenic disturbances and mitigation planning, and a necessary step toward enhancing the economic and social well-being of dryland communities in a sustainable manner (Global …

Remote Sensing Time-Series Analysis, Machine Learning, And K-Means Clustering Improves Dryland Vegetation And Biological Soil Crust Classification, Joshua Enterkine

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Dryland and semi-arid vegetation communities, although appearing to the casual observer as relatively simplistic and homogeneous, are in fact the opposite. Upon further inspection, semi-arid vegetation is highly complex and heterogeneous at almost any scale. The same holds true for biological soil crust. Growing concern about global changes in climate, nutrient cycles, and land use have required increasing scrutiny of our understanding of these communities and all of their constituents, as we seek to improve forecasting models and inform land management decisions. This thesis aims to provide insight to the paradigm of how we create and interpret vegetation classifications in …

Deriving Landscape-Scale Vegetation Cover And Aboveground Biomass In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem Using Imaging Spectroscopy, Andrew Poley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Environmental disturbances in semi-arid ecosystems have highlighted the need to monitor current and future vegetation conditions across the landscape. Imaging spectroscopy provide the necessary information to derive vegetation characteristics at high-spatial resolutions across large geographic areas. The work of this thesis is divided into two sections focused on using imaging spectroscopy to estimate and classify vegetation cover, and approximate aboveground biomass in a semi-arid ecosystem.

The first half of this thesis assesses the ability of imaging spectroscopy to derive vegetation classes and their respective cover across large environmental gradients and ecotones often associated with semi-arid ecosystems. Optimal endmember selection and …

Tracking And Characterization Of Moving Acoustic Sources Using An Infrasound Array At Volcán Santiaguito, Guatemala, Brian R. Terbush

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Active volcanic processes produce large amounts of acoustic energy within the infrasound band (0-20 Hz). Infrasound-sensitive microphones are often installed in addition to other forms of volcano monitoring equipment to increase the ability to remotely detect volcanic activity. In this study, an array of microphones was deployed without any additional sensor types for 36 hours at Santiaguito, Guatemala, to test the detection capabilities of a standalone microphone array. Array processing was applied to the recorded data, through frequency-domain beamforming and calculating a Fisher statistic (F). A changing F-threshold value was applied to differentiate between desired detections, or …

Developing And Testing A Greenness-Duration Method For Mapping Irrigated Areas: A Case Study In The Snake River Plain, Blaine C. Dawson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Climate change has raised concerns about the interplay between agricultural productivity, water demand, and water availability in semi-arid to arid regions of the world. As these regions cover nearly 41% of the Earth’s surface and are home to more than 38% of the total global population of 6.5 billion, it is important to understand the implications of changes to water use and water availability on the civilizations and industries that rely upon already scarce water resources. Currently, irrigated agriculture is the dominant water user in these regions and is estimated to consume approximately 80% of the world’s diverted freshwater resources. …

Assessing The Value Of Improved Snow Information In Operational Hydrologic Models, Alison Christine Burnop

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The National Weather Service’s (NWS) operational hydrologic model, the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model (SACSMA), coupled with their temperature index snowmelt model, SNOW-17, were implemented in the Dry Creek Experimental Watershed (DCEW), located in the semi-arid region of southwestern Idaho, just north of the city of Boise, Idaho. The model was downscaled from the standard 1 HRAP to ¼ HRAP spatial resolution then calibrated using a modified manual calibration procedure from the NWS. The main modification was to decouple the SNOW-17 and SACSMA models during the calibration stage in order to accurately simulate the snow distribution without the interference of …