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Mass-Movement Disturbance Regime Landscapes, Hazards, and Water Implications: Grand Teton National Park
No full textThe Teton Range is the result of active crustal extension (normal faulting) and is the youngest range in the Rocky Mountains at approximately 2 million years old. This makes it a particularly attractive landscape to study, especially in terms of landform development and morphology because of its youth, state of seismic activity, and its recent deglaciation. These factors have combined to produce a unique fluvial landscape in that the fault-shattered metamorphic/igneous rocks of the range have been/are being eroded from their source cliffs at high rates which has covered the glacially scoured valley floors with colluvium such as talus slopes, rock slide, avalanche, and debris flow deposits. This project was focused on the characterization of all forms of mass movement, especially rock slides, multiple talus types (rockfall, alluvial, avalanche), protalus lobes, protalus ramparts, lobate and tongue-shaped rock glaciers, and their collective effects on water retention and its late-season delivery in the Grand Teton National Park, WY. A major goal of this project was to reclassify many of the mass movements in the park in an effort to streamline and simplify previous efforts by other scientists. Methods used during this study included field reconnaissance and measurements acquired during the summers of 2010 and 2013 and measurements taken from various datasets (NAIP imagery, shape files used within a GIS [ArcMap 10.0], and Google Earthâ¢). Mass movement deposits, as well as ice glaciers and long-term snowbanks, were mapped and interpreted. Overall conclusions are that the major sources of mass movements from the Archean crystalline core of the range are the result of extensive jointing, fault-shattering, increased frost-wedging at higher altitudes, slopes steepened by prior glacial erosion, and extensive snow avalanches. Areas of Paleozoic sedimentary rocks marginal to the crystalline core produce rockslides as a result of steep dips and unstable shales beneath massive overlying carbonates. The presence of internal ground ice enables development of protalus lobes, thicker rock-fragment flows, and thinner boulder streams. Such ground ice is likely to enhance late-season water delivery downstream unless climate warming and recurrent droughts become too extreme
UW-NPS Wilderness Internship
No full textIn the summer of 2013, projects regarding wilderness in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Memorial Parkway (Parkway) and Grand Teton National Park (Park) were researched and completed. The researcher worked under the direct supervision of Shan Burson, bioacoustics ecologist and wilderness coordinator for Grand Teton National Park, and with the staff of the Science and Resource Management Division of Grand Teton National Park. The main goal of the wilderness internship was the drafting of a wilderness eligibility assessment for the Parkway. Secondary tasks included research and recommendations for wilderness management in the Park
The least eigenvalue of the signless Laplacian of non-bipartite unicyclic graphs with k pendant vertices
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A Newton method for canonical Wiener-Hopf and spectral factorization of matrix polynomials
No full textPaths of Recovery: Landscape Variability in Forest Structure and Function 25 Years after the 1988 Yellowstone Fires
No full textUnderstanding succession following severe wildfire is increasingly important for forest managers in western North America and critical for anticipating the resilience of forested landscapes to changing environmental conditions. Successional trajectories set the stage for future carbon storage, abundance and distribution of fuels, and habitat for many species. Early successional forests are increasing throughout the West in response to greater fire activity, but few long-term studies have considered succession following stand-replacing wildfires over large areas. The size and heterogeneity of the 1988 Yellowstone fires created novel opportunities to study succession at an unprecedented scale following severe fire, and we have studied the consequences of these fires for >20 years. In 2012, we began a re-sampling effort in long-term vegetation plots within the area burned by the 1988 fires to answer three overarching questions: (1) Are stand structure and function beginning to converge twenty-five years after the Yellowstone Fires, and what mechanisms may contribute to convergence or divergence? Heterogeneity in forest structure was the rule after the 1988 fires, and postfire lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) densities ranged from zero to >500,000 trees/ha. The post-1988 cohort of lodgepole pine is reaching a time of critical transitions in structure and function. (2) Are plant community composition and species richness converging or diverging across gradients in local fire severity, post-fire lodgepole pine density, elevation and soil type a quarter-century after the 1988 fires? A central objective in our research has been to understand the relative influence of contingent factors (e.g., local fire severity) vs. deterministic factors (e.g., elevation, soils) on postfire ecosystem development, and how these influences may change through time. (3) How do canopy and surface fuels vary across the postfire landscape, and how will the variation in fuels influence potential fire behavior a quarter century post-fire? Field sampling was conducted for this third question during summer 2012, and data analyses and interpretation are in progress. Overall, results from the proposed study will enhance understanding of succession after one of the most notorious fires of the 20th century. Yellowstoneâs postfire forests may serve as benchmarks for forests throughout the region and effective sentinels of change for the Rockies
