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Geography

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Tale Of Two Working Landscapes, Sage C. Sutcliffe Jan 2024

A Tale Of Two Working Landscapes, Sage C. Sutcliffe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.


Seeding Resilience: An Examination Of The Impacts Of A Seed Saving Network In Western Montana, Christina Leas Jan 2022

Seeding Resilience: An Examination Of The Impacts Of A Seed Saving Network In Western Montana, Christina Leas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Seed saving, a worldwide practice as old as agriculture, continues even in the context of an increasingly industrialized and globalized agricultural system. While some scholarship has focused on informal seed saving practices that continue to thrive in the global South, few studies have examined the dynamics of these practices in the global North, particularly in the American West. Informal seed saving systems have implications for the resilience of agroecosystems. The concept of resilience has become an important framework for conceptualizing agroecosystems as social-ecological systems, both in scholarship and in policy. However, operationalizing the concept of resilience, particularly in agroecology research, …


Remote Sensing Approaches To Predict Forest Characteristics In Northwest Montana, Ryan P. Rock Jan 2020

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 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 …


Protecting The Crown Of The Continent Ecosystem: A History Of Conservation In The Blackfoot And Swan Valleys, Montana, Verena Henners Jan 2016

Protecting The Crown Of The Continent Ecosystem: A History Of Conservation In The Blackfoot And Swan Valleys, Montana, Verena Henners

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Conservation strategies are essential tools for protecting landscapes and ecosystems. The Blackfoot and Swan Valleys in Montana, which are analyzed in this study, are considered to be prime examples of conservation efforts. Key conservation agencies in the study area include the Blackfoot Challenge and Swan Valley Connections. This study analyzes the history of conservation in the Blackfoot and Swan Valleys, current conservation practices, and contributors to successful conservation. The study uses the theoretical background of game theory and contributes to conservation theory and aims to contribute to the field of mountain geography. The methodological approach of the study is qualitative …


Hazardready – A Geographically Based Natural Hazard Education And Preparedness Web Application, Carson C. Macpherson-Krutsky Ms. Jan 2016

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 Jan 2015

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 …


Raising Grain In Next Year Country: Dryland Farming, Drought, And Adaptation In The Golden Triangle, Montana, Caroline M. Stephens Jan 2015

Raising Grain In Next Year Country: Dryland Farming, Drought, And Adaptation In The Golden Triangle, Montana, Caroline M. Stephens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climate change has already and will likely continue to impact agriculture in the Western United States, threatening water supplies for both irrigated and rainfed agriculture (Calzadilla et al. 2010; Chambers and Pellant 2008; MacDonald et al. 2010; Pedersen et al. 2009). In the Golden Triangle, a region in north central Montana, known for its dryland grain production, the same is true. There is a need for in-depth, fine-grained, place-based, and qualitative research about the process of climate change adaptation in agriculture (Miller et al. 2013). Drought challenges farmers in the Triangle, which is semiarid and receives 10-15 inches of annual …