Natural Resources and Conservation Commons^™

Lesser Prairie-Chicken Use Of Harvested Corn Fields During Fall And Winter In Southwestern Kansas, Gregory C. Salter, Robert J. Robel, Kenneth E. Kemp

The Prairie Naturalist

The lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) has declined in numbers in Kansas primarily due to the conversion of sand sagebrush (Artemisia .filifolia) prairie to cropland. The lesser prairie-chicken in Finney County, Kansas exists primarily in large fragments of sand sagebrush prairie, and it forages during fall and winter on waste grain in harvested com (Zea mays) fields adjacent to prairie fragments. We used radio-telemetry to monitor lesser prairie chicken locations and found no significant relationship between numbers of bird locations and amounts of waste grain on the ground in harvested com fields. Even the harvested …

Apparent Soil Electrical Conductivity: Applications For Designing And Evaluating Field-Scale Experiments, C. K. Johnson, Kent M. Eskridge, D. L. Corwin

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

On-farm field-scale research has become increasingly common with the advent of new technologies. While promoting a realistic systems perspective, field-scale experiments do not lend themselves to the traditional design concepts of replication and blocking. Previously, a farm-scale dryland experiment in northeastern Colorado was conducted to evaluate apparent electrical conductivity (EC_a) classification (within-field blocking) as a basis for estimating plot-scale experimental error. Comparison of meansquare (MS) errors for several soil properties and surface residue mass measured at this site, with those from a nearby plot-scale experiment, revealed that EC_a-classified within-field variance approximates plot-scale experimental error. In the …

Vertical Movement Of Water In A High Plains Aquifer Induced By A Pumping Well, Xunhong Chen, Yanfeng Yin, James W. Goeke, Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Field observation and numerical simulations were carried out to evaluate the hydraulic relationship between the shallow and deep aquifer of a High Plains Aquifer system, in which shallow and deep aquifers are separated by an aquitard. Pumping from the lower aquifer resulted in a small drawdown in the upper aquifer and a larger drawdown in the aquitard; pumping from the shallow aquifer caused a small drawdown in the aquitard and the deep aquifer. Analysis of pumping test data gives the values of the hydraulic conductivity of the aquitard and the deep aquifer. Long-term observation of groundwater levels in the shallow …

Presentation To Friends Of Red Rock Canyon February 8, 2005, Nancy Flagg

Presentations (PLI)

University engages in selected SNPLMA projects as determined by the four federal agencies, which are:

• Compatible with UNLV’s mission.
• Enhance education and research.
• Draw upon expertise of faculty, staff, and students.

Presentation To Outside Las Vegas Foundation January 31, 2005, Public Lands Institute

Presentations (PLI)

The Public Lands Institute is dedicated to strengthening the national fabric that is essential for the protection, conservation, and management of public lands.

Effect Of Bio-Optical Parameter Variability On The Remote Estimation Of Chlorophyll-A Concentration In Turbid Productive Waters: Experimental Results, Giorgio Dall'olmo, Anatoly A. Gitelson

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The analytical development and underlying hypothesis of a three-band algorithm for estimating chlorophyll-a concentration ([Chla]) in turbid productive waters are presented. The sensitivity of the algorithm to the spectral location of the bands used is analyzed. A large set of experimental observations ([Chla] varied between 4 and 217 mg m^-3 and turbidity between 2 and 78 nephelometric turbidity units) was used to calibrate and validate the algorithm. It was found that the variability of the chlorophyll-a fluorescence quantum yield and of the chlorophyll-a specific absorption coefficient can reduce considerably the accuracy of remote predictions of [Chla]. Instead of parameterizing …

2004 Plant Community Field Surveys In Western Nebraska (Final Report), Robert F. Steinauer

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission: White Papers, Conference Presentations, and Manuscripts

These surveys were undertaken to update information on native plant communities and wildlife habitats in western Nebraska to facilitate the development of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission’s (NGPC) Comprehensive Wildlife Plan. The specific intent of the project was to identify, map, and give quality rankings to large blocks of privately-owned native plant communities within the survey area. In 2004, the surveys focused on Chase, Dundy, Hayes, Hitchcock, and Perkins counties in southwestern Nebraska, and Sioux, Dawes, Box Butte, Morrill and eastern Banner and Scotts Bluff counties in the Panhandle.

Draft Pathogen Tmdl For The Taunton River Watershed, Massachusetts Department Of Environmental Protection, Usepa New England Region 1, Ensr International

Reference Documents

No abstract provided.

Quality Control Of Pre-1948 Cooperative Observer Network Data, Kenneth E. Kunkel, David R. Easterling, Kenneth Hubbard, Kelly Redmond, Karen Andsager, Michael C. Kruk, Michael L. Spinar

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

A recent comprehensive effort to digitize U.S. daily temperature and precipitation data observed prior to 1948 has resulted in a major enhancement in the computer database of the records of the National Weather Service’s cooperative observer network. Previous digitization efforts had been selective, concentrating on state or regional areas. Special quality control procedures were applied to these data to enhance their value for climatological analysis. The procedures involved a two-step process. In the first step, each individual temperature and precipitation data value was evaluated against a set of objective screening criteria to flag outliers. These criteria included extreme limits and …

Effects Of Spring Supplementary Feeding On Population Density And Breeding Success Of Released Pheasants Phasianus Colchicus In Britain, Roger A. H. Draycott, Maureen I. A. Woodburn, John P. Carroll, Rufus B. Sage

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The release of hand-reared ring-necked pheasants Phasianus colchicus in summer is a common practice in Britain to increase the number of birds available to hunters in winter. The breeding success of the birds which survive the shooting season is poor. Traditionally, birds are provided with supplementary wheat grain from release until the end of the shooting season (1 February) to maintain body condition and to help hold birds in areas for hunting. During 1997- 2000 we assessed the effect of continuing supplementary feeding into spring on pheasant density and breeding success on seven private shooting estates. On each estate we …

Social Science To Improve Fuels Management: A Synthesis Of Research Relevant To Communicating With Homeowners About Fuels Management, Martha C. Monroe, Lisa Pennisi, Sarah Mccaffrey, Dennis Mileti

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Discrete State-Space Approximation Of The Continuous Kalinin-Milyukov-Nash Cascade Of Noninteger Storage Elements, Jozsef Szilagyi

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Flow Routing With Unknown Rating Curves Using A State-Space Reservoir-Cascade-Type Formulation, Jozsef Szilagyi, Gabor Balint, Balazs Gauzer, Peter Bartha

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Climate And Landcover Change On Stream Discharge In The Ozark Highlands, Usa, Q. Steven Hu, Gary D. Willson, Xi Chen, Adnan Adnan

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Stream discharge of a watershed is affected and altered by climate and landcover changes. These effects vary depending on the magnitude and interaction of the changes, and need to be understood so that local water resource availability can be evaluated and socioeconomic development within a watershed be pursued and managed in a way sustainable with the local water resources. In this study, the landcover and climate change effects on stream discharge from the Jacks Fork River basin in the Ozark Highlands of the south-central United States were examined in three phases: site observation and data collection, model calibration and simulation, …

Multi-Platform Comparisons Of Modis And Avhrr Normalized Difference Vegetation Index Data, Kevin P. Gallo, Lei Ji, Brad Reed, Jeffrey Eidenshink, John Dwyer

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The relationship between AVHRR-derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values and those of future sensors is critical to continued long-term monitoring of land surface properties. The follow-on operational sensor to the AVHRR, the Visible/Infrared Imager/ Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), will be very similar to the NASA Earth Observing System’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor. NDVI data derived from visible and near-infrared data acquired by the MODIS (Terra and Aqua platforms) and AVHRR (NOAA-16 and NOAA-17) sensors were compared over the same time periods and a variety of land cover classes within the conterminous United States. The results indicate that the …

An Artificial-Neural-Network-Based, Constrained Ca Model For Simulating Urban Growth, Qingfeng Guan, Liming Wang, Keith C. Clarke

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Insufficient research has been done on integrating artificial-neural-network-based cellular automata (CA) models and constrained CA models, even though both types have been studied for several years. In this paper, a constrained CA model based on an artificial neural network (ANN) was developed to simulate and forecast urban growth. Neural networks can learn from available urban land-use geospatial data and thus deal with redundancy, inaccuracy, and noise during the CA parameter calibration. In the ANN -Urban-CA model we used, a two-layer Back-Propagation (BP) neural network has been integrated into a CA model to seek suitable parameter values that match the historical …

Development Of A Quality-Assessed Agrichemical Database For Monitoring Anthropogenic Impacts On Ground-Water Quality, Mary Exner Spalding, Roy F. Spalding, Dorothy M. Harrell

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The Quality-Assessed Agrichemical Contaminant Database for Nebraska Ground Water is a unique repository of nitrate and pesticide data collected by federal, state, and local agencies. Each contaminant concentration in the database has been evaluated based upon well-defined criteria that address completeness of the well-attribute data, analytical method and field and laboratory quality control practices and assigned to one of five quality levels. The quality assessment level always accompanies the contaminant concentration so that the end-user knows the quality assurance effort expended in the acquisition of the data, can select comparable data, and choose data whose quality assurance effort is commensurate …

Some Concerns When Using Data From The Cooperative Weather Station Networks: A Nebraska Case Study, Hong Wu, Kenneth G. Hubbard, Jinsheng You

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

In this study, daily temperature and precipitation amounts that are observed by the Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) were compared among geographically close stations. Hourly observations from nearby Automatic Weather Data Network (AWDN) stations were utilized to resolve the discrepancies between the observations during the same period. The statistics of maximum differences in temperature and precipitation between COOP stations were summarized. In addition, the quantitative measures of the deviations between COOP and AWDN stations were expressed by root-mean-square error, mean absolute error, and an index of agreement. The results indicated that significant discrepancies exist among the daily observations between some paired …

Objective Threshold Determination For Nighttime Eddy Flux Filtering, Lianhong Gu, Eva M. Falge, Tom Boden, Dennis D. Baldocchi, T.A. Black, Scott R. Saleska, Tanja Suni, Shashi Verma, Timo Vesala, Steve C. Wofsy, Liukang Xu

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

We recommend an automated statistical method (Moving Point Test, or MPT) to determine the friction velocity (u*) thresholds in nighttime eddy flux filtering. Our intention is to make the determination of the u* thresholds objective and reproducible and to keep flux treatment consistent over time and across sites. In developing the MPT method, we recognize that both ecosystem respiration and u* exhibit diurnal and seasonal cycles and there are potential correlative changes between them, which must be removed before u* can be used as a filter criterion. MPTuses an iterative approach to simultaneously determine a valid temperature response function, which …

El Malpais Area: National Monument, National Conservation Area And The West Malpais And Cebolla Wilderness Areas, Kathryn M. Mutz, Doug Cannon, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Books, Reports, and Studies

53 p. : ill., maps

In Search Of Sustainable Water Management: International Lessons For The American West And Beyond, Douglas S. Kenney

Books, Reports, and Studies

This digital resource contains only an abstract, cover image and table of contents information from the published book.

Print copy of book is available in the University of Colorado’s Wise Law Library: http://lawpac.colorado.edu/record=b279300~S0

Contents: Water policy and cultural exchange : transferring lessons from around the world to the western United States / James L. Wescoat Jr. -- Roles for the public and private sectors in water allocation : lessons from around the world / Charles W. Howe, Helen Ingram -- Integrating environmental and other public values in water allocation and management decisions / David H. Getches, Sarah B. Van de …

Highway 12, Christian Probasco

All USU Press Publications

Highway 12 is undoubtedly one of not only America's but the world's most scenic highways. From its intersection on the west with Highway 89 south of Panguitch, Utah, it runs up through Red Canyon onto the Paunsagunt Plateau and across Bryce Canyon National Park. It then drops into the Paria River Valley, passes through several tiny villages, crosses some extraordinary (for anywhere but this region) badlands, and descends the Escalante River into Potato Valley. While a driver may justifiably feel she has seen some scenery by that point, the highway is just getting started, for in the next stretch, it …

High, Wide, And Handsome: The River Journals Of Norman D. Nevills, Roy Webb

All USU Press Publications

When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he …

Gila Box Area: Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, And The Fishhooks And Needle's Eye Wilderness Areas, Douglas S. Kenney, Doug Cannon, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Books, Reports, and Studies

23 p. : ill., map

Land Evaluation Standards For Land Resource Mapping : Assessing Land Qualities And Determining Land Capability In South-Western Australia, Dennis Van Gool, Peter J. Tille, Geoff Allen Moore

Resource management technical reports

This report describes the standard method for attributing and evaluating conventional land resource survey maps in the south-west agriculture region of Western Australia so that strategic decisions about the management, development and conservation of land resources can be based on the best information available. The standards described are similar to the land suitability assessment (stage one of the two stage) methods described by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, 1976, 1983).

Steroid Hormone Levels Are Related To Choice Of Colony Size In Cliff Swallows, Charles R. Brown, Mary Bomberger Brown, Samrrah A. Raouf, Linda C. Smith, John C. Wingfield

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

One hypothesis to explain the extensive variation in colony size seen in most
taxa is that individuals sort themselves among groups based on phenotypic characteristics
that correlate with their performance in groups of different sizes. We investigated how
baseline levels of the steroid hormones, corticosterone and testosterone, were associated
with choice of colony size and the likelihood of moving to a different site in later years
in colonially nesting Cliff Swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) in southwestern Nebraska,
USA, in 2000–2004. We sampled hormone levels of birds caught at colonies and, using
mark–recapture, monitored their movement and choice of colony size …

Monitoring Temporal Change In Riparian Vegetation Of Great Basin National Park, E. A. Beever, D. A. Pyke, J. C. Chambers, F. Landau, S. D. Smith, K. Murray

Life Sciences Faculty Research

Disturbance in riparian areas of semiarid ecosystems involves complex interactions of pulsed hydrologic flows, herbivory, fire, climatic effects, and anthropogenic influences. We resampled riparian vegetation within ten 10-m × 100-m plots that were initially sampled in 1992 in 4 watersheds of the Snake Range, east central Nevada. Our finding of significantly lower coverage of grasses, forbs, and shrubs within plots in 2001 compared with 1992 was not consistent with the management decision to remove livestock grazing from the watersheds in 1999. Change over time in cover of life-forms or bare ground was not predicted by scat counts within plots in …

Who Are Resource Nonusers And What Can They Tell Us About Nonuse Values? Decomposing User And Nonuser Willingness To Pay For Coastal Wetland Restoration, Robert J. Johnston, James J. Opaluch, Gisele Magnusson, Marisa J. Mazzotta

Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Faculty Publications

This article assesses the potential for incomplete definitions of resource use to influence estimates of nonuser willingness to pay (WTP), with an emphasis on resources for which an exhaustive set of uses may be difficult to characterize. The data are drawn from a stated preference analysis involving coastal wetland restoration. Results suggest that mechanisms used to distinguish users and nonusers of wetland services may influence estimates of nonuser WTP and that for some attributes, traditional distinctions between user and nonuser WTP may have arguable empirical justification. More broadly, results suggest that relationships among use behaviors and restoration values may be …

Cache County, Utah Resource Assessment, Utah Association Of Conservation Districts, Utah Department Of Agriculture And Foods, Natural Resources Conservation Service

All U.S. Government Documents (Utah Regional Depository)

This resource assessment is designed to gather and display information specific to Cache County, Utah. This report will highlight the natural and social resources present in the county, detail specific concerns, and be used to aid in resource planning and target conservation assistance needs. This document is dynamic and will be updated as additional information is available through a multi-agency partnership effort. The general observations and summaries are listed first, followed by the specific resource inventories.

Visualizing Food And Farm, 2005 Joint Meetings Of The Agriculture, Food, And Human Values Society (Afhvs) And Association For The Study Of Food And Society (Asfs): Program And Abstracts, Jane Adams, Lorna Michael Butler, Richard P. Haynes, Laura B. Delind

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Faculty Publications

Visualizing Food and Farm

2005 Joint Meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS) and Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS)

Program and Abstracts

June 9-12, 2005, Portland, Oregon, United States