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SCHEDULEMonday, March 29, 2004 Thursday, April 1, 2004
Thursday, April 1, 2004 7:00 AM - 6:30 PM Parthenon Foyer
Thursday, April 1, 2004 7:00 AM - 8:00 AMBoardroom C Landscape Ecology Editorial Board Members only.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 Welcome to the Inaugural US-IALE Software and Model Demonstration and Swap Meet where you can enjoy hands-on demonstrations and samples of landscape ecology oriented software and models. Presenters hours will posted on the message board and at the presenters stations.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 VFS (Visualized Fire Simulation) is a graphic user interface (GUI) based computer program to simulate and animate fire on heterogeneous landscapes. VFS captures fire spread behaviors based on fuel configuration, wind regime and topographical effects using either partial differential equation (PDE) method or various percolation algorithms such as static percolation, depth first search recursive algorithm, and dynamic percolation with fire front. Users can compare the simulation capability of each method from visual perception and scientific analysis of output (e.g., burned pattern maps) using the analysis package built in the VisualFire or an external one (e.g., Fragstats). Furthermore, output from VisualFire can be linked to GIS and used to cross validate other fire simulation models such as EMBYR. To accommodate understanding the sensitivity of the input parameters of each method, users can specify a range and an increase step for a parameter in VFS so that a series of such parameter values will be generated sequentially, and each value will be applied into one simulation that can have as many replicates as users want. Finally, VFS can be used as a parameterization tool for the forest landscape models that incorporate fire spread simulation (e.g. LANDIS). VisualFire is written in C++ and programmed in DLL, and run on Windows platform.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 We present a software framework for running the Gradient Nearest Neighbor (GNN) method for predictive vegetation mapping. GNN applies direct gradient analysis and nearest-neighbor imputation to ascribe detailed ground attributes of vegetation to each pixel in a digital landscape map. To do this, GNN integrates vegetation measurements from regional grids of field plots, mapped environmental data, and Landsat TM imagery. In the resulting vegetation map, multiple vegetation attributes are represented as continuous variables that can be classified and queried to address a variety of objectives. . The GNN software tool is meant to aid researchers and analysts with experience in GIS and ordination techniques in creating spatially explicit surfaces from multivariate models. The framework currently is configured to work with a variety of ordination techniques (e.g., canonical correspondence analysis and redundancy analysis), spatial formats (e.g., Arc GRID, Imagine, generic binary) and spatial domains (e.g., point, window, attribute query). We also include methods for determining map accuracy based on a modified jackknifing approach as well as spatial uncertainty measures based on multiple-neighbor imputation. The software runs as a stand-alone Windows application. Future enhancements will include incorporating other statistical methods and developing an ArcMap extension that would allow more exploratory analysis.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 HARVEST is a timber harvest simulation model constructed to allow the input of specific rules to allocate forest stands for even-age harvest (clearcuts and shelterwood) and group selection, using parameters commonly found in National Forest Plan standards and guidelines. The model produces landscape patterns that have spatial attributes resulting from the initial landscape conditions and potential timber management activities. The model is simplistic in that it does not attempt to optimize timber production or quality, nor does it predict the specific locations of future harvest activity, as it ignores many considerations such as visual objectives and road access. Instead, the model stochastically mimics the allocation of stands for harvest by forest planners, using the constraints of the standards and guidelines and the spatial distribution of management zones (each with specific management objectives). Modeling this process allows experimentation to link variation in management strategies with the resulting pattern of forest openings and the distribution of forest age classes. A simplified version for educational purposes (Harvest Lite) will also be demonstrated.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 EPA's Regional Vulnerability Assessment Program's web-based Environmental Decision Toolkit (EDT) facilitates decision-making by allowing users to view maps of, and relationships between individual spatial variables/coverages and indicators, or integrated indices of relative condition and vulnerability. Trade-offs can be evaluated by comparing different sets of indicators (e.g. those relating to water quality or human health) and by differentially weighting selected indicators (or decision criteria) based on stakeholder input. The EDT, developed initially for the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., incorporates future scenarios of the 5 major drivers of change (land use change, spread of non indigenous species, resource extraction, changes in pollution and pollutants, and climate change), allowing insights into the cumulative impacts associated with these changes. The web-based application has been developed as a flexible framework that can be used in any region, and with any scale data. A public version of the mid-Atlantic version of the EDT will be deployed later in 2004. This tool will be a critical aid to state and local governments, and regional EPA offices and planning bodies in developing efficient and effective strategies for community-based environmental protection.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 Methodology and technological tools are required to extend conservation planning to the thousands of institutions that impact biodiversity through their routine planning and management. NatureServe, in cooperation with several partners, is putting to use its unique combination of expertise in biodiversity information, data management, and information technology to develop a decision-support system, or DSS. With the help of the DSS, planners, conservation groups, and local governments will be better able to integrate biodiversity information into their land use planning. The DSS is a collection of desktop and Internet software tools and information resources, supported by a network of experts to apply them to real-world land use and conservation decisions. These tools allow users to harness the power of advanced geographic information systems to visualize the environment and evaluate alternative scenarios for the future. The result is an overlapping continuum among scientists, planners, and stakeholders that allows for iterative planning and evaluation using best available data and conservation planning theory. A beta test version of the software will be demonstrated at the 2004 US-IALE meeting. The initial version of the decision support system is planned for release in 2004.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) tool is a GIS-based multipurpose hydrologic analysis system for use by watershed, land, water, and biological resource managers and scientists in performing watershed- and basin-scale studies. It is an extension for ESRI’s ArcView 3.X that uses readily available spatial data sets to parameterize, run, and visualize results from two widely used watershed runoff and erosion models: the Kinematic Runoff and Erosion Model (KINEROS), and the Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). It is also designed to facilitate the assessment of hydrologic impacts associated with landscape and land-use change by allowing the user to compute and visualize the difference between simulation results. The utility of AGWA in joint hydrologic and ecological investigations has been demonstrated on such diverse landscapes as southeastern Arizona, southern Nevada, central Colorado, and upstate New York. AGWA was developed jointly by the USDA-ARS Southwest Watershed Research Center and the U.S. EPA Landscape Ecology Branch, and is distributed freely via the internet as a modular, open-source suite of programs (www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa www.epa.gov/nerlesd1/land-sci/agwa/).
The Analytical Tools Interface for Landscape Assessments (ATtILA) is an ArcView extension that calculates many commonly used landscape metrics. By providing an intuitive interface, the extension provides the ability to generate landscape metrics to a wide audience, regardless of their GIS knowledge level. ATtILA is a robust, flexible program. It accepts data from a broad range of sources and is equally suitable across all landscapes, from deserts to rain forests to urban areas. Four families of metrics are included in the extension: landscape characteristics, riparian characteristics, human stressors, and physical characteristics. Each group has a dialog to accept user input on which metrics to calculate and what input data to use. Landscape characteristics are related to land cover proportions and patch metrics. Riparian characteristics describe land cover adjacent to and near streams. Human Stressors are concerned with population, roads, and land use practices, and physical characteristics provided statistical summaries of such attributes as elevation and slope. The extension has three types of output display available. The first displays areas ranked by individual metric values, the second ranks areas by a weighted index made up of two or more metrics, and the third displays a bar chart of selected areas and metrics.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 A comprehensive procedure for computing soil erosion and sediment delivery metrics has been developed using a suite of automated Arc Macro Language (AML) scripts and a pair of processing-intensive ANSI C++ executable programs operating on an ESRI ArcGIS (c) 8.2 Workstation Platform. The computing algorithms are rooted in the technical literature of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) soil erosion modeling framework and the spatially explicit delivery model (SEDMOD) sedimentation framework. This suite of programs can be used to estimate the RUSLE-based soil erosion rate, the SEDMOD-based sediment delivery rate and other ancillary soil and landform characteristics at multiple reporting scales. The beta version of the software is currently available for testing and evaluation.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Parthenon 1-2 PATCH is a spatially-explicit, individual-based, life history simulator designed for terrestrial landscapes. It is available now, but is also undergoing active development. PATCH is presently a females-only model, and is useful for evaluating the impacts of landscape alteration on wildlife populations. The model includes environmental stochasticity and dynamic landscape change, and incorporates limited density dependence. PATCH reads GIS habitat maps, and is parameterized using species-habitat preferences, territory size, vital rates, and estimates of movement ability. PATCH's outputs include measures of population size, projected habitat occupancy and movement patterns, and identification of demographic sources and sinks. Improvements being made include generalizing an animal’s use of space to accommodate irregular territories or aggregations (e.g. flocks, colonies, packs, herds). Future versions will allow users to construct the life cycle from a suite of survival, reproduction, movement, and other events, making it possible to model complex life histories and a variety of disturbances beyond habitat alteration. Density dependence will be better addressed by linking individual vital rates to per-capita measures of local resource availability. Future versions will follow males and females, and allow the simulation of species interactions.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM Apollo Room 2
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM Apollo Room 2 Forest landscape ecology has evolved and matured to a point where we can begin to confidently transfer some science and tools for forest policy makers and practitioners. A substantial body of information, knowledge, and technology has accumulated during the last 10-15 years. Some forest/land management agencies, forest companies, and NGOs have recognized the importance of landscape ecology, and are making efforts to incorporate principles of LE and tools in to their management planning. However, they face many obstacles in this task. Technology transfer and extension is a relatively alien topic to forest landscape ecologists, and there has been very little dialogue on this topic among landscape ecology professional meetings.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 11:40 AM Apollo Room 3-4
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM Apollo Room 5
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM Zeus Room B Understanding the dynamic interactions between society and nature is at the heart of the emerging field of sustainability science whose ultimate goal is to promote sustainable landscapes. The number of large landscape projects that include elements of integration between disciplines has been steadily growing since the mid 1990s. The challenges facing researchers working on such landscape projects include selecting and developing appropriate methodological approaches for addressing their specific research questions and integrating disciplinary knowledge to solve complex environmental problems. Integrative research teams face problems of communicating across disciplinary boundaries and thus have difficulties identifying project goals and the methodologies needed to reach these goals. The background for these difficulties is often related to differences in epistemology of different knowledge cultures. There might be fundamental differences in the perception of what research is, what is regarded as data, reliable methods, and research outputs. If landscape ecology is to contribute to the management of sustainable landscapes, it should increase its body of knowledge towards developing concepts and methods that can be used by integrative research teams. These concepts and methods need to be appealing and acceptable to researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds and seen as relevant to sustainability science. This special session will offer a unique opportunity for researchers to discuss such conceptual and programatic issues. The special session will include contributions that existing and emerging landscape ecology concepts and methodologies(e.g. sustainability science, ecological networks, cultural landscapes, landscape scenarios, habitat supplementation and complementation,landscape continuity, heterogeneity, scale effects, dispersion) and contribute to the development of a science of sustainable landscapes.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM Zeus Room C Fire regimes are commonly characterized by frequency, or fire return interval, severity, and typical fire size. These fire statistics are highly dependent, however, on the spatial and temporal scale and extent of data collection and analysis. These scale dependencies are often ignored or over-simplified when using fire statistics to guide ecosystem restoration and management. Correct parameterization of landscape fire models and interpretation of model results depend on an explicit understanding of scaling relationships. It is time to move fire history studies into a landscape framework that explicitly accounts for the scale-dependence in fire-regimes. In this special session we will examine how spatial and temporal patterns in landscape fire regimes change across scales, under a transdisciplinary framework that includes perspectives from stochastic theory, physics, physical geography and terrain analysis, climatology, paleoecology, and social science. We address the following specific topics: 1) the event-area relationship, 2) neutral landscape models, 2) scale-dependence in past and present landscape fire regimes, 3) climatic and topographic constraints on landscape fire regimes at multiple scales, and 4) integration of land-use, vegetation, and fire regimes across scales.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM Apollo Room 5
The unique geologic features, plants and animals of Red Rock Canyon NCA represent some of the best examples of the Mojave Desert. Scant rainfall and scarce permanent water, along with desiccating winds and high temperatures make this a harsh environment for plants and wildlife, yet a surprising number of plants and animals inhabit the Red Rock Canyon NCA. Its deep sandstone canyons provide a perennial water supply, cool temperatures and a wide variety of vegetation that serves as ideal habitat for many animal and plant species. In fact, over 100 bird species, 45 mammals, 20 species of lizards, 25 species of snakes and two species of turtles and tortoises have been identified within the conservation area.
Las Vegas is best experienced on foot. From the Pyramid at one end of the strip to the Stratosphere tower on the other end. Enjoy this half day journey with a guide and a group.
Mount Charleston in the Spring Mountain Range is located west of Las Vegas. The area contains five eco-zones ranging from the Southern Desert Shrub zone to the Pseudo-Alpine zone. Elevation ranges from 4,500 feet to 11,918 feet on the Charleston Peak (one of the highest peaks in Nevada). This high mountain country is a green jewel in the southern Nevada sun, providing escape from the summer desert heat and a refreshing contrast to the lights and sounds of the city of Las Vegas. These forested, mountain environment are unique with no similar environment within hundreds of miles.
Thursday, April 1, 2004 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM Parthenon 1
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 PM - 8:45 PM Parthenon 3-4 The various fields of environmental science are more abundantly endowed with technological expertise than with a broad ethical and philosophical base to guide application of this technology. Many "judgment calls" must be made, often without the benefit of legal or procedural guidelines, and under strong political pressure from development interests to compromise the basic natural resource. Compounding this problem is a general failure of most university resource management curricula to require (or even offer) courses in the rapidly emerging fields of environmental ethics or philosophy, thereby producing (in effect)missiles without guidance systems. Evidence of this syndrome is universal, and potential resource impacts are enormous. Case histories are discussed, and remedies are suggested. Aldo Leopold's "The Land Ethic" (A Sand County Almanac) underlies the presentation, which also draws heavily upon the thinking of contemporary environmental scientists and philosophers.
Following the US-IALE banquet, students are invited to convene at a local pub for an evening of informal conversation. Beverages and light snacks will be provided courtesy of US-IALE. [CLICK TO EXPAND] Saturday, April 3, 2004 [CLICK TO EXPAND] Sunday, April 4, 2004 [CLICK TO EXPAND]
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