Life Sciences Commons^™

Identifying Sources Of Landscape Variation To Improve Predictions Of Post-Fire Sagebrush Steppe Recovery, Cara Applestein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Sagebrush steppe ecosystems are endangered landscapes, threated by the annual grass-fire cycle where invasion by annual grasses drives larger fires and larger fires drive invasion. Despite extensive input of resources by land management agencies, restoration of these ecosystems is notoriously variable and difficult to predict. Understanding and accounting for variation is key to effectively allocating limited resources and having success in restoring burned sagebrush landscapes. I utilized Bayesian modeling to assess how variation in weather, seed dispersal, and topography/slope/landscape position affects understanding of post-fire sagebrush-steppe recovery and how we can best incorporate sources of variation into models predicting where plant …

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 …

Remote Sensing For Management Of Invasive Plants In Great Lakes Coastal Wetlands, Matthew James Unitis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Great Lakes coastal wetlands are some of the most crucial ecosystems to biodiversity in the Great Lakes Basin, yet suffer increasing degradation due to invasive plants. Wetland plant invasions can be controlled in their initial stages, but early detection of invasive plants using field surveys are often untenable due to budget constraints. Remote sensing techniques offer solutions to management objectives during the early stages of invasion on a landscape scale due to their ability to cheaply create spatially explicit information about plant distributions. Some invasive plants, such as Typha x. glauca, are conspicuous on a large scale, and can be …

Assessing The Limitations And Capabilities Of Lidar And Landsat 8 To Estimate The Aboveground Vegetation Biomass And Cover In A Rangeland Ecosystem Using A Machine Learning Algorithm, Shital Dhakal

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Remote sensing based quantification of semiarid rangeland vegetation provides the large scale observations required for monitoring native plant distribution, estimating fuel loads, modeling climate and hydrological dynamics, and measuring carbon storage. Fine scale 3-dimensional vertical structural information from airborne lidar and improved signal to noise ratio and radiometric resolution of recent satellite imagery provide opportunities for refined measurements of vegetation structure.

In this study, we leverage a large number of time series Landsat 8 vegetation indices and lidar point cloud - based vegetation metrics with ground validation for scaling aboveground shrub and herb biomass and cover from small scale plot …

Identifying Topographic Controls Of Terrestrial Vegetation Using Remote Sensing Data In A Semiarid Mountain Watershed, Idaho, Usa, Ricci Loughridge

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Global climate change is a significant research focus area in contemporary Earth science. Changes in climatic patterns have already resulted in shifting energy flows with associated changes in hydrologic and ecologic systems. More specifically, changes in vegetation distribution and abundance are one of the most visible and potentially significant effects of a changing climatic regime. However, to monitor and predict future changes in vegetation, the initial conditions must be well characterized. This thesis examines the distribution of vegetation in a semiarid mountain watershed in three important ways: (1) quantifying the factors affecting the distribution of broad classes of vegetation at …