Forest harvesting and climate change induced shifts in precipitation characteristics (i.e., intensity, type) may affect how water is partitioned on the landscape, with more water potentially being lost to evaporation or groundwater, and less water being partitioned into the stream. Long-term, paired watershed data allows us to assess these possible...
Ecology is focused on understanding how organisms interact with each other and their environments, across ecological, spatial, and temporal scales. Thus, understanding how processes and patterns of ecological systems change across space and time is a principle goal for conservation biologist globally. While many approaches exist for investigating the changing...
Standard geostatistical models used in abundance prediction assume that observed counts on each site are made without error. However, in some wildlife populations, assuming perfect detection of animal or plant counts is unrealistic.
We first construct an adjustment to a finite population block kriging (FPBK) estimator that allows the possibility...
After a 40-year absence from Oregon’s landscape, expanding gray wolf (Canis lupus) populations are reestablishing elements of interspecific competition with sympatric large carnivores, like cougars (Puma concolor). This presents new challenges for management of large carnivores and their ungulate prey populations (e.g., elk, Cervus canadensis nelsoni; mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus)...
Models of a species’ distribution and models of a species’ spatially explicit density are valuable tools for conservation. They allow researchers to estimate changes in distributions, densities, and populations, based on changing environmental conditions. To trust such estimates, however, the quality of models is exceedingly important. Model performance can be...
Forested, mountain landscapes in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) are changing at an unprecedented rate, largely due to shifts in the regional climate regime. Documented climatic trends across the PNW include increasing wildfire frequency and intensity and an increasingly ephemeral snowpack, especially at moderate elevations. One relationship that has yet to...
Forests should be monitored and measured frequently to ensure its sustainability and continuity of carbon sequestration. However, conventional monitoring methods are costly and labor intensive. New technologies, such as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can be used as an alternative method to monitor and measure forests. The objective of this study...
In many traditional computer graphics applications, rendered scenes typically utilize 3D meshes to represent objects within an environment. As the demand to further improve the realism of graphics applications increases, such as for movies and games, it is becoming more important to represent the inner volumes of object meshes. In...
Environmental magnetic techniques have been used to discriminate sources of sediments from a variety of natural and anthropogenic sources. In many studies, magnetic properties such as susceptibility, have served as a proxy for heavy metal concentrations. In these cases, there tends to be enhancement of magnetic minerals. The study presented...
In this thesis, the spatial patterns of vegetation and soils of reference and restored tidal marshes were compared to determine the extent to which restored sites differ from the reference site after 40 years of restoration. Vegetation surveys of 1m x 1m plots were conducted along previously-established transects of salt...