Growing awareness of the accelerating pace of global environmental change has heightened the need for effective means to monitor and analyze changes in natural conditions throughout the world. Satellite imagery and other forms of remote sensing have greatly increased the amount of raw data available for tracing changes in natural conditions, but techniques for converting that data in useful information necessary to evaluate changes in natural patterns and processes have been slower to develop. This project will improve and refine methods for measuring changes in many of the attributes of vegetation in arid and semiarid regions. By evaluating the reflectance properties and locational patterns of different types of vegetation, the investigator should be able to develop standard rules that will enable remotely sensed images across larger areas to be used to more accurately map vegetational patterns. By analyzing images of the same area taken over time, changes in vegetational patterns can be mapped and more direct analyses of the processes of vegetational change can be undertaken. This project will be undertaken by the collaborator in collaboration with ecologists at the Jornada Long-Term Ecological Reserve in New Mexico. This research will be beneficial from both methodological and substantive standpoints. The analysis of properties that more reliably identify vegetation will be of value to all scholars studying vegetational patterns. By using this information to improve and test models of ecosystem change, this research also will benefit those seeking to increase understandings of the roles of a wide range of factors in ecological change.
