Publications

Abstract The landform reference ontology (LFRO) is being developed to formalize ontological distinctions underlying naïve geographic cognition and reasoning about landforms. The LFRO taxonomy is currently based only on form-based distinctions. In this significantly revised version, several new categories have been added to explicate ontological distinctions related to material-spatial...

This specification documents the requirements and standards used to produce the seamless elevation layers for The National Map of the United States. Seamless elevation data are available for the conterminous United States, Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories, in three different resolutions—1/3-arc-second, 1-arc-second, and 2-arc-second. These specifications include requirements and...

This report describes a software tool that imports gravity anomaly point data from the Gravity Database of the United States (GDUS) of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and University of Texas at El Paso along with elevation data from The National Map (TNM) of the U.S. Geological Survey that lie within a user-specified geographic area of interest. Further, the tool integrates...

Project Need and Overview Drought poses a serious threat to the resilience of human communities and ecosystems in the United States (Easterling and others, 2000). Over the past several years, many regions have experienced extreme drought conditions, fueled by prolonged periods of reduced precipitation and exceptionally warm temperatures. Extreme drought has far-reaching impacts on water...

This assessment was conducted to fulfill the requirements of section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and to improve understanding of factors influencing carbon balance in ecosystems of Hawai‘i. Ecosystem carbon storage, carbon fluxes, and carbon balance were examined for major terrestrial ecosystems on the seven main Hawaiian islands in two time periods: baseline...

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the use of species distribution models (SDMs) to characterize patterns of species’ occurrence and abundance. Efforts to parameterize SDMs often create a tension between the quality and quantity of data available to fit models. Estimation methods that integrate both standardized and non-standardized data types offer a potential solution to...

In business, benchmarking is a widely used practice of comparing your own business processes to those of other comparable companies and incorporating identified best practices to improve performance. Biologists and resource managers designing and conducting monitoring programs for fish in large river systems tend to focus on single river basins or segments of large rivers, missing...

Historic lead and zinc (Pb-Zn) mining in southeast Missouri’s ―Old Lead Belt‖ has left large chat piles dominating the landscape where prior to 1972 mining was the major industry of the region. As a result of variable beneficiation methods over the history of mining activity, these piles remain with large quantities of unrecovered Pb and Zn and to a lesser extent cadmium (Cd)...

Human‐caused climate change is predicted to affect the frequency of hazard‐linked extremes. Unusually large wildfires are a type of extreme event that is constrained by climate and can be a hazard to society but also an important ecological disturbance. This chapter focuses on changes in the frequency of extreme monthly area burned by wildfires for the end of the 21st century for a...

Domestic and foreign renewable energy targets and financial incentives have increased demand for woody biomass and bioenergy in the southeastern United States. This demand is expected to be met through purpose-grown agricultural bioenergy crops, short-rotation tree plantations, thinning and harvest of planted and natural forests, and forest harvest residues. With results from a forest...

Production of woody biomass for bioenergy, whether wood pellets or liquid biofuels, has the potential to cause substantial landscape change and concomitant effects on forest ecosystems, but the landscape effects of alternative production scenarios have not been fully assessed. We simulated landscape change from 2010 to 2050 under five scenarios of woody biomass production for wood...

This book encapsulates and extends many seminal ideas presented at the eighth “Attending to Early Modern Women” conference held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in June 2012. Merry Wiesner-Hanks has done a masterful job editing these papers within a central theme of the interaction of spatial domains with gender-based phenomena. The fifteen chapters of this book are organized...