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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Geography

Series

Senator George J. Mitchell Center

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

High-Precision Land-Cover-Land-Use Gis Mapping And Land Availability And Suitability Analysis For Grass Biomass Production In The Aroostook River Valley, Maine, Usa., Chunzeng Wang, Jason Johnston, David Vail, Jared Diskinson, David Putnam Mar 2015

High-Precision Land-Cover-Land-Use Gis Mapping And Land Availability And Suitability Analysis For Grass Biomass Production In The Aroostook River Valley, Maine, Usa., Chunzeng Wang, Jason Johnston, David Vail, Jared Diskinson, David Putnam

Publications

High-precision land-cover-land-use GIS mapping was performed in four major townships in Maine’s Aroostook River Valley, using on-screen digitization and direct interpretation of very high spatial resolution satellite multispectral imagery (15–60 cm) and high spatial resolution LiDAR data (2 m) and the field mapping method. The project not only provides the first-ever high-precision land-use maps for northern Maine, but it also yields accurate hectarage estimates of different land-use types, in particular grassland, defined as fallow land, pasture, and hay field. This enables analysis of potential land availability and suitability for grass biomass production and other sustainable land uses. The results show …


Pushing The Pace Of Tree Species Migration, Eli D. Lazarus, Brian Mcgill Aug 2014

Pushing The Pace Of Tree Species Migration, Eli D. Lazarus, Brian Mcgill

Publications

Plants and animals have responded to past climate changes by migrating with habitable environments, sometimes shifting the boundaries of their geographic ranges by tens of kilometers per year or more. Species migrating in response to present climate conditions, however, must contend with landscapes fragmented by anthropogenic disturbance. We consider this problem in the context of wind-dispersed tree species. Mechanisms of long-distance seed dispersal make these species capable of rapid migration rates. Models of species-front migration suggest that even tree species with the capacity for long-distance dispersal will be unable to keep pace with future spatial changes in temperature gradients, exclusive …


The Complementary Niches Of Anthropocentric And Biocentric Conservationists, Malcolm L. Hunter Jr., Kent H. Redford, David Lindenmayer Apr 2014

The Complementary Niches Of Anthropocentric And Biocentric Conservationists, Malcolm L. Hunter Jr., Kent H. Redford, David Lindenmayer

Publications

A divergence of values has become apparent in recent debates between conservationists who focus on ecosystem services that can improve human well-being and those who focus on avoiding the extinction of species. These divergent points of view fall along a continuum from anthropocentric to biocentric values, but most conservationists are relatively closer to each other than to the ends of the spectrum. We have some concerns with both positions but emphasize that conservation for both people and all other species will be most effective if conservationists focus on articulating the values they all share, being respectful of divergent values, and …


An Assessment Of Methods And Remote-Sensing Derived Covariates For Regional Predictions Of 1 Km Daily Maximum Air Temperature, Beniot Parmentier, Brian Mcgill, Adam Wilson, James Regetz, Walter Jetz, Robert Guralnick, Mao-Ning Tuanmu, Natalie Robinson, Mark Schildhauer Jan 2014

An Assessment Of Methods And Remote-Sensing Derived Covariates For Regional Predictions Of 1 Km Daily Maximum Air Temperature, Beniot Parmentier, Brian Mcgill, Adam Wilson, James Regetz, Walter Jetz, Robert Guralnick, Mao-Ning Tuanmu, Natalie Robinson, Mark Schildhauer

Publications

The monitoring and prediction of biodiversity and environmental changes is constrained by the availability of accurate and spatially contiguous climatic variables at fine temporal and spatial grains. In this study, we evaluate best practices for generating gridded, one-kilometer resolution, daily maximum air temperature surfaces in a regional context, the state of Oregon, USA. Covariates used in the interpolation include remote sensing derived elevation, aspect, canopy height, percent forest cover and MODIS Land Surface Temperature (LST). Because of missing values, we aggregated daily LST values as long term (2000–2010) monthly climatologies to leverage its spatial detail in the interpolation. We predicted …