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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Monitoring The Wetland Landscape: White-Faced Ibis (Plegadis Chihi) Breeding Habitat As A Model Assemblage, Shea P. Coons
Monitoring The Wetland Landscape: White-Faced Ibis (Plegadis Chihi) Breeding Habitat As A Model Assemblage, Shea P. Coons
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Wetlands structure landscape biodiversity by providing critical habitat to numerous fish and wildlife species. However, climate change, growing human populations, and shifting land use practices strain limited water supplies that sustain wetlands in the semi-arid western US. Conserving a wetland network with prominent value to wildlife is paramount to ensure future security of habitat and ecosystem processes. Here, I use white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi; hereafter ‘ibis’) breeding colonies as a model system to identify and monitor a landscape-scale wetland network across the semi-arid western US. Ibis serve an important role in marking ecologically important wetland networks because they require a …
Investigating Surface Temperature From First Principles: Seedling Survival, Microclimate Buffering, And Implications For Forest Regeneration, Robin Rank
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Forests are extremely important ecosystems with large impacts on global water, energy, and biogeochemical cycling, and they provide numerous ecosystems services to human populations. Even though these systems consist of long-lived vegetation, forests are constantly experiencing changes to their extent and composition through the interacting forces of disturbance dynamics and climate change. In semi-arid landscapes like the western United States, patterns of recurring wildfire and subsequent seedling recruitment and forest regeneration are important in establishing the distribution of forests on the landscape. In this context, climate, hydrology, and existing vegetation all act together to limit the current and potential range …
Remote Sensing Approaches To Predict Forest Characteristics In Northwest Montana, Ryan P. Rock
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 …
Use Of Airborne Digital Imagery To Examine Floodplain Complexity At Varying Discharges, Katelyn P. Driscoll
Use Of Airborne Digital Imagery To Examine Floodplain Complexity At Varying Discharges, Katelyn P. Driscoll
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
Floodplains are composed of aquatic and terrestrial habitats that are frequently reshaped by hydrologic processes operating at various spatial and temporal scales. I hypothesized that floodplain habitat complexity is maximized at intermediate discharges because small changes in flow result in substantial aquatic habitat changes and extreme discharges are associated with a decreased habitat heterogeneity. Between April and September 2014, I collected ultra-high resolution digital multispectral imagery of the Clark Fork River, Montana taken on 6 dates between early spring and fall. Following image mosaicking into a single image, unsupervised classification of the spectral reflectance was used to identify and quantify …