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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Estimating Cattle Density Using Wildlife Cameras, Emily Bonebrake
Estimating Cattle Density Using Wildlife Cameras, Emily Bonebrake
Fall Student Research Symposium 2021
Quantifying the abundance and distribution of animal populations is critical for effective wildlife research and management. Due to their cost-effectiveness, wildlife cameras have become an increasingly popular tool for estimating population densities. Previously, this technique relied on ‘capture-recapture’ models that utilized re-sightings of individually marked animals, but in recent years methods have been developed to estimate the population densities of unmarked animals. One such method is the random encounter and staying time (REST) technique, which does this by assuming that the cumulative time animals stay within the view of the camera scales linearly with the number of individuals. This allows …
Understanding How Changes In Precipitation Intensity Will Affect Vegetation In The Western U.S., Cristina Chirvasa
Understanding How Changes In Precipitation Intensity Will Affect Vegetation In The Western U.S., Cristina Chirvasa
Fall Student Research Symposium 2021
Precipitation events are becoming more intense as the atmosphere warms, but it remains unclear how precipitation intensification will affect plant growth in arid and semiarid ecosystems. There is conflicting evidence suggesting that larger precipitation events may either increase or decrease plant growth. Here, we report the growth responses of herbaceous and woody plants to experimental manipulations of precipitation intensity in a cold, semi-arid ecosystem in Utah, USA. In this experiment, precipitation was collected and redeposited as fewer, larger events with total annual precipitation kept constant across treatments. Results from the first two growing seasons revealed that more intense events ‘pushed’ …