Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Electric Grid Decarbonization Pathways: Landscape Impacts, Policy Interactions, And The Need For Cooperation, Austin Wesley Thomas

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Climate change has motivated governments around the world to ratify aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Meeting these targets will require improved energy efficiency, behavior changes, and energy system decarbonization. Many climate change and energy policy targets imply the deployment of large amounts of low carbon, renewable energy resources like wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels but do not specify how these resources will be sited on the landscape. The relationships between weather conditions, terrain, land cover, existing electric grid infrastructure, and electricity consumers will govern how these wind and solar PV infrastructure configurations develop and how quickly they …

Remote Sensing Methods And Applications For Detecting Change In Forest Ecosystems, David James Gudex-Cross

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Forest ecosystems are being altered by climate change, invasive species, and additional stressors. Our ability to detect these changes and quantify their impacts relies on detailed data across spatial and temporal scales. This dissertation expands the ecological utility of long-term satellite imagery by developing high quality forest mapping products and examining spatiotemporal changes in tree species abundance and phenology across the northeastern United States (US; the ‘Northeast’).

Species/genus-level forest composition maps were developed by integrating field data and Landsat images to model abundance at a sub-pixel scale. These abundance maps were then used to 1) produce a more detailed, accurate …