Land Resources and Environmental Sciences

Bryophytes and lichens are ubiquitous in subarctic ecosystems, but their roles in controlling Lorna E. Street † ‡ energy fluxes are rarely studied at the species level despite large, recent observed shifts Aiden V. Johnson* in subarctic vegetation. We quantified the surface and subsurface temperatures and spectral Ana Prieto-Blanco § and reflectance of common moss and lichen species at field sites in Alaska and Sweden. We also used MODIS observations to determine if the removal of Cladonia spp. by reindeer Stephanie A. Ewing* overgrazing impacts land surface albedo and temperature. Radiometric surface temperature *Department of Land Resources and of a feather moss (Pleurozium schreberi) exceeded 50 ЊC on occasion when dry, up to Environmental Sciences, Montana State 20 ЊC higher than co-located Sphagnum fuscum or C. rangiferina. Spectral reflectance of University, 334 Leon Johnson Hall, S. fuscum was on average higher than Polytrichum piliferum across the 350-1400 nm Bozeman, Montana 59717, U.S.A. †School of Biological Sciences, range, with substantial within-species variability. MODIS albedo was significantly higher University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 on the Norwegian (relatively undisturbed) side versus the Finnish (disturbed) side of a 3UU, U.K. border reindeer fence by an average of 1% during periods without snow cover. MODIS ‡School of Biological Sciences, Bangor nighttime land surface temperatures were often significantly higher on the Norwegian side

Without their collective knowledge, support, and patience, this research would not have been possible. The knowledge and academic development provided by my course work at Montana State University is also a significant contribution to the completion of not only this research, but my intellectual and personal development. Many fellow graduate students played an important role in this research as well including:

Mountain snowpacks provide most of the annual discharge of western US rivers, but the future of water resources in the western USA is tenuous, as climatic changes have resulted in earlier spring melts that have exacerbated summer droughts. Compounding changes to the physical environment are biotic disturbances including that of the mountain pine beetle (MPB), which has decimated millions of acres of western North American forests. At the watershed scale, MPB disturbance increases the peak hydrograph, and at the stand scale, the ‘grey’ phase of MPB canopy disturbance decreases canopy snow interception, increases snow albedo, increases net shortwave radiation, and decreases net longwave radiation versus the ‘red’ phase. Fewer studies have been conducted on the red phase of MPB disturbance and in the mixed coniferous stands that may follow MPB‐damaged forests. We measured the energy balance of four snowpacks representing different stages of MPB damage, management, and recovery: a lodge...

Marie Jasieniuk,1 Bruce D. Maxwell,2 Randy L. Anderson,3 John 0. Evans,4 Drew J. Lyon,5 Stephen D. Miller,6 Don W Morishita,7 Aex G. Ogg, Jr.,8 Steven Seefeldt,9 Phillip W.XT Stahlman,10 Francis E. Northam,'0 Philip Westra, 1 Zewdu Kebede, Gail A. Wicks'2 I ...

For elk (Cervus elaphus) in the Gallatin drainage of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Montana, USA, wolf movements caused local predation risk to vary substantially on a time scale of days. Spatially and temporally fine-scaled data from GPS radio collars show that elk moved into the protective cover of wooded areas when wolves were present, reducing their use of preferred grassland foraging habitats that had high predation risk. By constraining habitat selection, wolves may have greater effects on elk dynamics than would be predicted on the basis of direct predation alone. Based on changes in the woody vegetation following the reintroduction of wolves, it has been suggested that antipredator responses by elk may be driving a trophic cascade in the Yellowstone ecosystem. However, studies to date have been hampered by a lack of direct data on spatial variation in predation risk, and the ways in which elk respond to variation in risk. Our data support a central portion of the hypothesis that elk antipredator behavior could drive a trophic cascade, but changes in elk numbers are also likely to have affected elk-plant interactions.

Our environment is replete with visual cues intended to guide human navigation. For example, there are building directories at entrances and room numbers next to doors. By developing a robot wheelchair system that can interpret these cues, we will create a more robust and more usable system. This paper describes the design and development of our robot wheelchair system, called Wheeley, and its visionbased navigation system. The robot wheelchair system uses stereo vision to build maps of the environment through which it travels; this map can then be annotated with information gleaned from signs. We also describe the planned integration of an assistive robot arm to help with pushing elevator buttons and opening door handles.

This paper presents a data-driven expert-guided method of coastal typology development using a large, heterogeneous data set. The development of coastal typologies is driven by a desire to upscale detailed regional information to a global scale in order to study coastal zone function and the effects of global climate change. We demonstrate two methods of automatic typology generation--unsupervised clustering and region growing with agglomerative clustering--and a method of selecting an appropriate number of classes based on the concept of Minimum Description Length. We compare two methods of defining distance between data points with a large number of variables and potentially missing data--average scaled Euclidean distance and maximum scaled difference. To visualize the resulting typologies we use a novel algorithm for assigning colors to different classes of data based on class similarity in a high-dimensional space. This combination of techniques results in a methodology through which one or more experts can easily develop a useful coastline typology with results that are similar to pre-existing expert typologies, but which makes the process more quantitative, objective, consistent, and applicable across space and time.

The role of terrigenous sediment in controlling the occurrence of coral reef ecosystems is qualitatively understood and has been studied at local scales, but has not been systematically evaluated on a global-to-regional scale. Current concerns about degradation of reef environments and alteration of the hydrologic and sediment cycles place the issue at a focal point of multiple environmental concerns. We use a geospatial clustering of a coastal zone database of river and local runoff identified with 0.5j grid cells to identify areas of high potential runoff effects, and combine this with a database of reported coral reef locations. Coastal cells with high runoff values are much less likely to contain reefs than low runoff cells and GIS buffer analysis demonstrates that this inhibition extends to offshore ocean cells as well. This analysis does not uniquely define the effects of sediment, since salinity, nutrients, and contaminants are potentially confounding variables also associated with runoff. However, sediment effects are likely to be a major factor and a basis is provided for extending the study to higher resolution with more specific variables. D

Coastal zone managers need to factor submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) in their integration. SGD provides a pathway for the transfer of freshwater, and its dissolved chemical burden, from the land to the coastal ocean. SGD reduces salinities and provides nutrients to specialized coastal habitats. It also can be a pollutant source, often undetected, causing eutrophication and triggering nuisance algal blooms. Despite its importance, SGD remains somewhat of a mystery in most places because it is usually unseen and difficult to measure. SGD has been directly measured at only about a hundred sites worldwide. A typology generated by the Land-Ocean Interaction in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) Project is one of the few tools globally available to coastal resource managers for identifying areas in their jurisdiction where SGD may be a confounding process. (LOICZ is a core project of the International Geosphere=Biosphere Programme.) Of the hundreds of globally distributed parameters in the LOICZ typology, a SGD subset of potentially relevant parameters may be culled. A quantitative combination of the relevant hydrological parameters can serve as a proxy for the SGD conditions not directly measured. Web-LOICZ View, geospatial software then provides an automated approach to clustering these data into groups of locations that have similar characteristics. It permits selection of variables, of the number of clusters desired, and of the clustering criteria, and provides means of testing predictive results against independent variables. Information on the occurrence of a variety of SGD indicators can then be incorporated into regional clustering analysis. With such tools, coastal managers can focus attention on the most likely sites of SGD in their jurisdiction and design the necessary measurement and modeling programs needed for integrated management. Biogeochemistry 145-158, 2003. 66: 157

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Interactive robotics demands real-time visual information about the environment. Real time vision processing, however, places a heavy load on the robot's limited resources, and must accommodate other processes such as speech recognition, animated face displays, communication with other robots, navigation and control. For our entries in the 2000 American Association for Artificial Intelligence robot contest, we developed a vision module capable of providing real-time information about ten or more operators while maintaining at least a 20Hz frame rate and leaving sufficient processor time for the robot's other capabilities. The vision module uses a probabilistic scheduling algorithm to ensure both timely information flow and a fast frame capture. The vision module makes its information available to other modules in the robot architecture through a shared memory structure. The information provided by the vision module includes the operator information along with a confidence measure and a time stamp. Because of this design, our robots are able to react in a timely manner to a wide variety of visual events.

This paper presents a segmentation system, based on a general framework for segmentation, that returns not only regions that correspond to coherent surfaces in an image, but also low-level interpretations of those regions' physical characteristics. This system is valid for images of piecewise uniform dielectric objects with highlights, moving it beyond the capabilities of previous physics-based segmentation algorithms which assume uniformly colored objects. This paper presents a summary of the complete system and focuses on two extensions of it that demonstrate its interpretive capacity and applicability to more complex scenes. The first extension provides interpretations of a scene by reasoning about the likelihood of different physical characteristics of simple image regions. The second extension allows the system to handle highlights within the general framework for segmentation. The resulting segmentations and interpretations more closely match our perceptions of objects since the resulting regions correspond to coherent surfaces, even when those surfaces have multiple colors and highlights.

Alfred the robot won first place in the Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? event and also received an award for the best integrated effort at the 1999 American Association of Artificial Intelligence robot competition. The three unique features that Alfred displayed were: the ability to nudge his way through a crowd to cover a large serving area, a strong personality--that of a proper British butler, and the ability to recognize people he had served before. This paper describes the integrated navigation, natural language processing, and vision system that enabled these capabilities.

Typology, the 'study or systematic classification of types that have characteristics or traits in common', has become a commonly used term and technique in coastal zone studies over the past two decades. At least part of this is due to adoption by the first LandeOcean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) project of a typological approach as a way to understand and organize the daunting diversity of natural and human systems comprising the world coastal zone, and to the concurrent development of tools and databases to support systematic applications. This paper reviews some of the history of the term 'typology' and the concepts and techniques that it subsumes, and discusses its adoption and adaptation in coastal studies. It also addresses the continued and increasing relevance of typology to the continuation of the LOICZ project and its objectives, and outlines the opportunities and challenges involved in realizing the potentials of the approach e both within LOICZ and for the scientific and coastal zone communities in general.

We follow in the tradition of stroke based non-photorealistic rendering pioneered by Haelberi [1990]. Inspired by expressionistic paintings such as Van Gogh's Starry Night, we have begun experimenting with fluid simulation as a tool for brush stroke alignment.

This paper presents a new model for understanding the appearance of objects that exhibit both body and surface reflection under realistic illumination. Specifically, the model represents the appearance of surfaces that interact with a dominant illuminant and a non-negligible ambient illuminant that may have different spectral power distributions. Real illumination environments usually have an ambient illuminant, and the current dynamic range of consumer cameras is sufficient to capture significant information in shadows. The bi-illuminant dichromatic reflection model explains numerous empirical findings in the literature and has implications for commonly used chromaticity spaces that claim to be illumination invariant but are not in many natural situations. One outcome of the model is the first 2-D chromaticity space for an RGB image that is robust to illumination change given dominant and ambient illuminants with different spectral power distributions.