Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Master's Project: Morey Mountain Conservation Area Management Plan, James M. Nash-Howe

Rubenstein School Masters Project Publications

The acquisition of the Morey Mountain Conservation Area (MMCA) adds another important parcel into the Upper Valley Land Trust’s (UVLT) portfolio of conserved lands; however, the specific conservation values found on the parcel were not known until recently.

In the summer of 2019, I, Max Nash-Howe—as a graduate student at the University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources—spent several weeks surveying the property to inventory forest types, unique natural communities, and other important conservation values. My findings and recommendations for how the UVLT should manage the parcel to ensure the integrity of the conservation values found on …

Tools For Landscape-Scale Automated Acoustic Monitoring To Characterize Wildlife Occurrence Dynamics, Cathleen Michelle Balantic

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In a world confronting climate change and rapidly shifting land uses, effective methods for monitoring natural resources are critical to support scientifically-informed management decisions. By taking audio recordings of the environment, scientists can acquire presence-absence data to characterize populations of sound-producing wildlife over time and across vast spatial scales. Remote acoustic monitoring presents new challenges, however: monitoring programs are often constrained in the total time they can record, automated detection algorithms typically produce a prohibitive number of detection mistakes, and there is no streamlined framework for moving from raw acoustic data to models of wildlife occurrence dynamics. In partnership with …

New Hybrid Protected Lands Layer For Vermont Conservation Design Analysis (February 2019), Carolyn D. Loeb, Anthony W. D'Amato

Rubenstein School Masters Project Publications

This shapefile (.shp) is a hybrid of the March 2017 Edition of the Vermont Center for Geographic Information's (VCGI) Vermont Protected Lands Database (VPLD), the Vermont Land Trust's February 2019 Protected Lands database, and The Nature Conservancy's Secured Areas (SA 2018+) database. The VLT and SA 2018+ datasets were used as the scaffolding for the hybrid protected lands layer, with some VCGI VPLD polygons retained if they contained unique contributions. These datasets were combined by C.D. Loeb because each input dataset was missing some protected lands polygons in the state of Vermont. Additionally, the VCGI VPLD dataset contained many overlapping …