Assessing historic change in subalpine forest : a case study in the West Castle Watershed

Alpine treeline ecotone (ATE) is a dynamic region where tree growth is limited by atmospheric temperature. Landscape scale variation in climate, topography, and disturbance regimes cause heterogeneity in the ATE by suppressing tree elevation below the absolute thermal limit to growth. In order to understand how ATE will respond to anticipated atmospheric warming, observations of historic change are required. This research introduces a novel method of canopy cover observation using oblique historic imagery. ATE change is assessed in the West Castle Watershed between 1914-2006, and found to be correlated to elevation, aspect, and fire-exposure. A random forest model was used to test a spatial extension of observed canopy cover change into areas that were not observed in the oblique imagery. This model used proxies for climate, topography, and disturbance regime as predictive variables. Collectively, this thesis research demonstrates that oblique photography can provide valuable insights into dynamic processes in the ATE

The Mountain Habitats Segmentation and Change Detection Dataset

<p>This is the dataset presented in the paper <em>The Mountain Habitats Segmentation and Change Detection Dataset</em> accepted for publication in the <em>IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision </em>(WACV), Waikoloa Beach, HI, USA, January 6-9, 2015. The full-sized images and masks along with the accompanying files and results can be downloaded here. The size of the dataset is about 2.1 GB.</p> <p>The dataset is released under the <em>Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License </em>(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode).</p> <p>The dataset documentation is hosted on GitHub at the following address: http://github.com/fjean/mhscd-dataset-doc. Direct download links to the latest revision of the documentation are provided below:</p> <ul> <li><strong>PDF format</strong>: http://github.com/fjean/mhscd-dataset-doc/raw/master/mhscd-dataset-doc.pdf</li> <li><strong>Text format</strong>: http://github.com/fjean/mhscd-dataset-doc/raw/master/mhscd-dataset-doc.rst</li> </ul> <p> </p