The American marten (Martes americana) is an endangered species in Vermont and a Regional Species of Greatest Conservation Need in the northeastern United States. Though historically widespread in northeastern forests, their range presumably contracted to northern Maine and the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks by the early 1900s. Regionally, populations appear to be in recovery. Natural recolonization is believed to have occurred in New Hampshire, northeastern Vermont and the western Adirondacks. A reintroduction effort in southern Vermont that was originally declared unsuccessful is now believed to be the source of a recently detected population in the area. However, our current knowledge of distribution, population history and population connectivity relies primarily on occurrence data from harvest records, which are limited in scope and resolution. In Vermont, where population size is estimated to be extremely low, more robust estimates of population status may be critical to continued recovery. I genotyped individuals from Maine, New York, New Hampshire, northeastern Vermont and southern Vermont at ten microsatellite loci and amplified a 320 base pair segment of the control region of mtDNA to estimate the source(s) of the two Vermont populations using statistical tests of genetic differentiation. I also used Bayesian and stochastic genetic clustering methods to estimate population genetic structure in the northeastern United States. Genetic structure exists at multiple scales in the region as a result of natural barriers to gene flow, human-mediated gene flow, and lineage sorting in relic populations. My results suggest that New Hampshire is a major source of colonization of northeastern Vermont and the population in southern Vermont is either a remnant of the reintroduction or a pre-reintroduction relic that has experienced introgression from the reintroduction stock. I identified three regions where relic populations perceived to be extirpated in the 1900s may have persisted. I also developed an occupancy model for American marten in the northeastern United States using mixed-effects logistic regression based on expert opinion data. Eighteen experts from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York with backgrounds in trapping, wildlife management, and wildlife science participated in the survey. Experts were asked to estimate the probability of marten occupancy at 30 sites in the northeastern United States. Three top models described the data. Habitat covariates in those models were 1) percent canopy cover, 2) percent spruce-fir forest cover, 3) winter temperature, 4) elevation, and 5) road density. An AIC-weighted average of these three models had significant predictive ability (area under an ROC curve = 0.88) with respect to occurrence records in the northeastern United States. In addition, the model predicted that high quality habitat existed patchily along the central and northern Green Mountain spine in Vermont – where no occurrence records exist for at least a century. Top-scoring movement corridors between southern Vermont and nearby populations in northeastern Vermont/New Hampshire and New York occurred in the northern and central Green Mountains and across high resistance movement barriers in the Champlain valley. Corridors to New York were considered strong movement barriers and are unlikely to facilitate gene flow.

The ability to accurately assess forest carbon storage is critical to understanding global carbon cycles and the effects of changes in land cover on ecological processes. However, existing methods for calculating carbon storage do not explicitly account for differences in carbon stored by different species of trees. Those methods that do reflect some of this variability, such as remotely-sensing canopy structure to estimate biomass, can be resource-intensive and difficult to reproduce over past or future time steps in order to assess change. I examined the accuracy of several carbon mapping approaches to understand how specificity of forest type classification (for example, classifying forest as "sugar maple/birch" versus simply "deciduous") affects landscape estimates of forest carbon storage in the northeastern United States. I constructed three distinct models to estimate aboveground and coarse roots forest carbon across the study region. These models varied primarily in the specificity of forest type classifications in the input maps and the corresponding carbon storage estimates used for each type. The forest classification schemes tested, from highest to lowest specificity, were: 1) relative basal area by species, 2) species association classes, and 3) coarse forest types (in accordance with IPCC (2006) guidelines). The specificity of forest type classifications in the input maps did influence results, with higher carbon storage estimates generated by models using coarser forest classifications. Maps generated by models that included relative basal area or species association classifications had similar means and standard deviations to the validation plots, as well as the highest correlations with 1000 random points from a remotely-sensed biomass map, suggesting that they better represent variability in carbon storage across the region; however, this variability was largely driven by the incorporation of stand age. Error increased at higher elevations, and decreased with higher total maple-beech-birch components. This likely reflects the dominance of low elevation hardwoods in the studies on which carbon storage estimate tables are based and demonstrates the importance of matching input estimates to region-specific studies. Current estimates of forest carbon storage from the US Forest Service predict 84-90 Mg/ha in this study area, a low value when compared with my modeled estimates of 104 Mg/ha, 108 Mg/ha, and 118 Mg/ha from the relative basal area, species association, and high IPCC models, respectively. If IPCC carbon estimates are to be applied in the northeastern US, the high end of these ranges should be used. Carbon storage estimates that consider different carbon storage capacities of different tree species are useful to explore temporal trends and relative spatial patterns in carbon storage across heterogeneous landscapes, but because of the coarse resolution and low accuracy of existing stand age maps, remotely-sensed biomass maps may be a better approach to quantify carbon stored at specific locations.

Please read the abstract in the section 09summary of this document / Thesis (PhD (Sustainable Ecological Management))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Animal and Wildlife Sciences / unrestricted

Rural communities living in the neighbourhoods of protected areas are among the least developed communities in the LDCs. In the global quest for sustainable development and democracy, participation in natural resource management by these communities has become an important component in rural development and biodiversity conservation programmes. The proliferation of CBNRM initiatives in the LDCs, however, has so far not yielded any fundamental reductions in poverty and insecurity in the targeted communities. This has raised questions about the viability of CBNRM as a strategy for articulating the development objectives of local communities. Questions have also been raised about the ideological bases of CBNRM. This dissertation presents an analysis of participation in a CBNRM initiative by the Makuleke community of South Africa. Focus is on the issues of community control and gender in the CBNRM process. Findings by the study show that the preconditions for community-level control have largely been met and the Makuleke CBO structure has been constituted as a representative and legally accountable entity. However, there apparently subsists a view that indigenous rural communities like the Makuleke cannot be fully entrusted with leadership roles in CBNRM. The study also finds that despite the securing of gender rights of access to bases of social power and productive wealth through legislative instruments, some social structures and attitudes that favour male dominance remain entrenched in the Makuleke community. These militate against the strategic participation by women in environmental governance and in the benefits stream emanating from CBNRM. The dissertation argues that the success of the CBNRM initiatives such as the Makuleke’s will depend on a more complex interplay of variables tan solely on the empowerment of the community through strengthening of CBO structures, securing resource rights, entry into the benefits stream and developing of capacities. Success will largely depend on the ability of CBNRM programmes to achieve fundamental reductions in poverty and insecurity. Since there are multiple jurisdictions in CBNRM, LDC states will have to strike a difficult balance or make a critical choice between promoting the interests of Northern agencies in order to secure conditions of production and defending the interests of local communities in order to secure social integration. The responses by LDC states will have significant implications on the success of CBNRM initiatives. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology / Unrestricted

Between 1988 and 2014, otter trawls, seine nets, and plankton nets were deployed along the salinity gradients of 18 estuaries by the University of South Florida and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI, a research branch of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission). The purpose of these surveys was to document the responses of aquatic estuarine biota to variation in the quantity and quality of freshwater inflows that were being managed by the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). In the present analyses, four community types collected by these gears were compared with a diversity of habitat factors to identify the factors with the greatest influence on beta diversity, and also to identify the factors that were most influential to important prey species and economically important species. The four community types were (1) plankton-net invertebrates, (2) plankton-net ichthyoplankton, (3) seine nekton, and (4) trawl nekton. The habitat factors were (1) vertical profiles of salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, and water temperature taken at the time of the biological collections, (2) various characterizations of local habitat associated with seine and trawl deployments, (3) chlorophyll a, color, and turbidity data obtained from the STORET database (US Environmental Protection Agency), and (4) data that characterize the effects of freshwater inflow on different estuarine zones, including factors for freshwater inflow, freshwater turnover time, and temporal instability in freshwater inflow (flashiness). Only 13 of the 18 estuaries had data that were comprehensive enough to allow habitat-factor analysis. An existing study had performed distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) and principle component analysis (PCA) for these data within 78 estuarine survey zones that were composited together (i.e., regardless of estuary of origin). Based on that study’s findings, the communities of primarily spring-fed and primarily surface-fed estuaries were analyzed separately in the present study. Analysis was also performed with the habitat factors grouped into three categories (water management, restoration, and water quality) based on their ability to be directly modified by different management sectors. For an analysis of beta diversity interactions with habitat factors, dbRDA (called distance-based linear modeling (DistLM) in the PRIMER software) was performed using PRIMER 7 software (Quest Research Limited, Auckland, NZ). The dbRDA indicated pH, salinity, and distance to the Gulf of Mexico (distance-to-GOM) usually explained the most variation in the biotic data. These results were compared with partial dbRDA using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) as the model selection criterion with distance-to-GOM held as a covariate to reduce the effect of differences in the connectivity of marine-derived organisms to the different estuaries; distance-to-GOM explained between 8.46% and 32.4% of the variation in beta diversity. Even with the variation from distance-to-GOM removed, salinity was still selected as most influential factor, explaining up to an additional 23.7% of the variation in beta diversity. Factors associated with the water-management sector were most influential (primarily salinity), followed by factors associated with the restoration sector (primarily factors that describe shoreline type and bottom type). For the analysis of individual species, canonical analysis of principal coordinates (CAP) was performed to test for significant difference in community structure between groups of sites that represented high and low levels of each factor. For those communities that were significantly different, an indicator value (IndVal) was calculated for each species for high and low levels of each factor. Among species with significant IndVal for high or low levels of at least one factor, emphasis was given to important prey species (polychaetes, copepods, mysids, shrimps, bay anchovy juveniles, and gammaridean amphipods) and to species of economic importance, including adults, larvae and juveniles of commercial and recreational fishes, pink shrimp, and blue crab. Shrimps, copepods and mysids were all associated with estuarine zones that had low percentages of wooded or lawn-type shoreline, a factor that may serve as a proxy for flood conditions, as lawns or trees were usually only sampled with seines at high water elevations and in the freshwater reaches of the estuaries. Many copepod and shrimp species were strongly associated with high flushing times, which suggests that if flushing times were too short in an estuarine zone, then these species or their prey would be flushed out. Multiple regression analysis was performed on each of the selected indicator species, using AIC as a selection criterion and distance-to-GOM as a covariate. As might be expected, the apparent influences of different habitat factors varied from species to species, but there were some general patterns. For prey species in both spring-fed and surface-fed estuaries, pH and flushing time explained a significant amount of variation. In surface-fed estuaries, the presence of oysters on the bottom also had a positive effect for many prey species. For economically important species, depth was important in both spring-fed and surface-fed estuaries. This suggested the importance of maintaining large, shallow areas, particularly in surface-fed estuaries. Another important factor in spring-fed estuaries was the percent coverage of the bottom with sand; however, a mixture of positive and negative coefficients on this factor suggested the importance of substrate variety. In surface-fed estuaries, flashiness also often explained substantial variation for many economically important species, usually with positive coefficients, possibly due to the importance of alternation between nutrient-loading and high-primary-productivity periods. When comparing the three management sectors, the restoration sector was the most explanatory. Several factors were averaged over entire estuaries due to data scarcity or due to the nature of the factors themselves. Specifically, the STORET data for chlorophyll, color, and turbidity was inconsistently distributed with in the survey areas and was not collected at the same time as the biological samples. Moreover, certain water-management factors such as freshwater-inflow rate and flashiness are inherently less dimensional than other factors, and could only be represented by a single observation (i.e., no spatial variation) at any point in time. Due to concern that reduced spatiotemporal concurrence/dimensionality was masking the influence of habitat factors, the community analysis was repeated after representing each estuary with a single value for each habitat factor. We found that far fewer factors were selected in this analysis; salinity was only factor selected from the water-management factors. Overall, the factor that explained the most variation most often was the presence of emergent vegetation on the shoreline. This factor is a good proxy for urban development (more developed areas have lower levels of emergent vegetation on the shoreline). Unlike the previous analysis, the restoration sector overwhelmingly had the highest R2 values compared with other management sectors. In general, these results indicate the seeming importance of salinity in the previous analysis was likely because it had a higher resolution compared with many other factors, and that the lack of resolution homogeneity did influence the results. Of the habitat factors determined to be most influential with the analysis of communities and individual species (salinity, pH, emergent vegetation and lawn-and-trees shoreline types, oyster and sand bottom types, depth, flashiness, and flushing time) most were part of an estuarine gradient with high values at one end of the estuary with a gradual shift to low values at the other end. Since many of the analyzed species also showed a gradient distribution across the estuary, the abundance and community patterns could be explained by any of the habitat factors with that same gradient pattern. Therefore, there is a certain limitation to determining which factors are most influential in estuaries using this type of regression-based analysis. Three selected factors that do not have a strong estuarine gradient pattern are the sand bottom type, depth, and flashiness. In particular, flashiness has a single value for each estuary so it is incapable of following the estuarine gradient. This suggests that flashiness has an important process-based role that merits further investigation of its effect on estuarine species.

Natural resource management models simplify reality for the purpose of planning or management. In much the same way, an uncertainty model simplifies the many uncertainties that pervade the natural resource management model. However, though a number of uncertainty models have been developed, there has been little work on verifying such models against the uncertainty they purport to represent. The central research question addressed by this work is 'can a natural resource management uncertainty model be verified in order to evaluate its utility in real-world management?' Methods to verity uncertainty models are developed in two areas: uncertainty data models, and uncertainty propagation through process models. General methods are developed, and then applied to a specific case study: slope stability uncertainty in the southern Queen Charlotte Islands. Verification of two typical uncertainty data models (of classified soils and continuous slope) demonstrates that (in this case) both expert opinion inputs and published error statistics underestimate the level of uncertainty that exists in reality. Methods are developed to recalibrate the data models, and the recalibrated data are used as input to an uncertainty propagation model. Exploratory analysis methods are then used to verify the output of this model, comparing it with a high-resolution mass wastage database—itself developed using a new set of tools incorporating uncertainty visualisation. Exploratory data analysis and statistical analysis of the verification shows that, given the nature of slope stability modelling, it is not possible to directly verify variability in the model outputs due to the existing distribution of slope variability (based on the nature of slope modelling). However, the verification work indicates that the information retained in uncertaintybased process models allows increased predictive accuracy—in this case of slope failure. It is noted that these verified models and their data increase real-world management and planning options at all levels of resource management. Operational utility is demonstrated throughout this work. Increased strategic planning utility is discussed, and a call is made for integrative studies of uncertainty model verification at this level. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Throughout this thesis I have laid out several factors that have contributed to the sustainability of shrimp farming in Thailand, and if sustainability whilst maintaining production can ever be achieved. To find out the current situation of shrimp farming in Thailand, the history of global and Thai shrimp farming is described. The social and environmental problems of the unsustainable history of shrimp farming in Thailand is then considered. Solutions to these effects conclude that it is up to the consumer to demand for better regulations from the government and the shrimp companies to ensure a sustainable future for shrimp farming both globally and in Thailand.

No description available.

As a result of the profound influence of theories of collective action such as The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisonerâ s Dilemma Game, and The Logic of Collective Action, policy analysts have recommended external management, either by government control or market participation, as the most efficient option to govern common pool resources. However, due to the repeated failure of the external intervention, a new alternative has been considered, the common property rights. Due to their long term interaction with the resources, local users have developed mechanisms, rules, and institutions that can be used to favor the sustainable management of the resources. Recognizing these benefits in places where the government has nationalized the resources, it has started a process of decentralization of property rights of natural resources to local users. The purpose of this paper is twofold, to analyze the potential benefits that a common property right regime has in the management of the environmental resources, and to evaluate which are the key factors for this arrangement to succeed. In this endeavor, the case of the Irrigation systems in Philippines is presented. / Master of Public and International Affairs

Meadows are crucial components to larger river watersheds because of their unique hydrologic and ecological functions. Due to climate change, over grazing, and fire suppression, conifer encroachment into meadows has accelerated. In some western regions, nearly half of all meadow habitat has been loss due to conifer encroachment. Restoration of these hydrologic systems requires tree removal. Many studies exist that address the issue of conifer encroachment in montane meadows, however, few studies focus on the role that conifer removal plays on the encroaching meadow. Furthermore, few studies exist that document the hydrologic change from conifer removal and further restoration steps, if any, to take after the removal. The overall research goal is to understand the efficacy of removal of encroached conifers from an encroached meadow (Marian Meadow) for successful meadow restoration. The objectives of this study are to determine (i) quantify the meadow hydrology following removal of encroached conifers, (ii) determine if forest tree removal adjacent to the meadow influences the meadow’s hydrology, and (iii) test three common revegetation techniques for a formerly encroached montane meadow.. Marian Meadow is in Plumas County, CA at an elevation of 4,900 feet. This 45-acre meadow enhancement project is part of a 2,046-acre timber harvest plan implemented by the Collins Pine Company. Soil moisture sensors at one foot below the ground and water table depth sensors at four feet below ground were installed in Marian Meadow and a control meadow in September 2013, with additional soil moisture sensors at three-foot depth installed August 2015. The removal of encroaching conifers from Marian Meadow occurred in June 2015. Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) was used to determine maximum water table depths and climatic variables were measured from a weather station as inputs for the water budget. A groundwater recession curve equation was used to model water table depths between water table depth sensor measurements and ERT measurements. A general linear model was used to determine any statistical significant difference in soil moisture and water table depths prior to and after conifer removal. Revegetation plots were installed at the start of the 2017 growing season to determine the establishment rate for three different techniques (BARE, WOOD, and EXISTING) and three different species of meadow plant. Technique BARE, which removes approximately 10 cm of top soil and disperses seed was statistically significant, yielding the highest population count. Another growing season data collection and control plot is required to draw further conclusions and recommendations. The water balance indicated that the majority of Marian Meadow and the Control Meadow’s water storage can be attributed to precipitation and not upland sources. This hydrologic characteristic is common in dry meadows. The statistical analysis indicated that measured water table depths increased on average by 0.62 feet following conifer removal. The first year following restoration and the second year following restoration yielded statistically significantly different water levels than pre-restoration water levels. The third year following restoration is inconclusive until the end of the 2018 WY data set is available. On average, soil moisture increased by 6.43% following conifer removal and was statistically significantly different in all three post restoration years when compared to pre-restoration volumetric soil moisture content. Additionally, growing season (April through September) water table depths indicated that meadow vegetation communities could be supported in Marian Meadow following conifer removal. The removal of conifers from an encroached meadow appears to promote soil moisture and water table depth conditions indicative of a meadow and meadow plant community types.