Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Alicia Torregrosa | | Title | Linking plots to landscapes: A synthetic framework for monitoring change in the Great Basin Ecosystem | | Affiliation | U.S. Geological Survey | | Authors | Alicia Torregrosa, Andrea Woodward, David Miller, David Bedford, David Pilliod, Marie Denn | | Keywords | Cumulative effects, Great Basin, Monitoring, Scaling, Socio-ecological models | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
Answers to decision- and policy-maker questions are rarely made at the same scale as the observations made to answer them. There is a growing recognition that ecosystem drivers and stressors operate at differing spatial extents and temporal rates across landscapes and that their effects accumulate heterogeneously, yet monitoring data collected by land management agencies are often limited to local or site-specific plots with varying return intervals. There is an urgent need to relate plot-based observations to broad landscape processes and develop a monitoring framework to observe changes in landscape functionality. The model framework being developed for a pilot USGS program in the Great Basin, scales relevant information between the plot and landscape level by integrating concepts from landscape ecology, ecosystem ecology, geostatistics, and geographic information science. The model framework is applied to a set of conceptual ecological models focused on biomes and hydrologic systems such as riparian, sagebrush steppe, pinyon-juniper, ground water, and springs and evaluates their interactions across space and time, using a hierarchical, cross-scale approach. Ongoing work includes developing a mechanistic understanding of the roles of spatial and temporal scales through structural modeling and implementing the model as a spatially explicit framework to begin to quantify cumulative effects on the natural resources of interest to Great Basin land managers. |
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