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Natural Resources and Conservation

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Remote sensing

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Magnitude And Rates Of Agriculturally-Induced Soil Erosion In The Midwestern United States, Evan Thaler Oct 2021

Magnitude And Rates Of Agriculturally-Induced Soil Erosion In The Midwestern United States, Evan Thaler

Doctoral Dissertations

Fertile, agricultural productive soils are essential for producing food for a growing global population. Soil erosion diminishes soil quality, threatens food security by decreasing crop productivity, and degrades ecosystem health through increased rates of sedimentation and runoff. Despite decades and thousands of soil erosion studies, robust scalable methods for estimating the magnitude and rates of soil erosion have been elusive. In this dissertation, we develop a remote sensing method for quantifying the areal extent of historical loss in an agricultural landscape and provide a method for estimating the total thickness of soil loss and rates of historical soil loss in …

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Characterizing The Landscape Dynamics Of An Invasive Plant And Risk Of Invasion Using Remote Sensing, Bethany Bradley, John F. Mustard Jan 2005

Characterizing The Landscape Dynamics Of An Invasive Plant And Risk Of Invasion Using Remote Sensing, Bethany Bradley, John F. Mustard

Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series

Improved understanding of the spatial dynamics of invasive plant species may lead to more effective land management and reduced future invasion. Here, we identified the spatial extents of nonnative cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) in the north central Great Basin using remotely sensed data from Landsat MSS, TM, and ETM+. We compared cheatgrass extents in 1973 and 2001 to six spatially explicit landscape variables: elevation, aspect, hydrographic channels, cultivation, roads, and power lines. In 2001, Cheatgrass was 10% more likely to be found in elevation ranges from 1400 to 1700 m (although the data suggest a preferential invasion into lower elevations by …

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