Tested in Texas savannas of a wide rainfall gradient, this dissertation endeavors to (1) map fractional woody cover at Landsat scale, for close and continuous woody plant encroachment monitoring, (2) model the pattern of potential woody cover over the present rainfall gradient, for implication of the end-point of woody plant encroachment, (3) analyze the rate and effect factors of woody plant encroachment under the regional context, for pertinent savanna management strategy.
Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) was used to calibrate the Salford Systems’ Classification and Regression Trees (CART) against training data of fractional woody cover derived from 1m resolution digital orthophotos. The CART model output was verified against an independent test data. This study provides a way to accurately monitor woody plant encroachment across savanna ecosystems at a fine spatial scale, and sets up a protocol for landscape components mapping at sub-pixel level in other ecosystems.
The pattern of potential woody cover was modelled over the wide rainfall gradient at Landsat scale (30m) and MODIS scale (500m) respectively. While a positive linear relationship between potential woody cover and mean annual precipitation (MAP) was revealed at Landsat scale, a prominent three-segment relationship was observed at MODIS scale. This discrepancy corroborates the scale dependency of the primary determinants of savanna woody plant density. According to the three-segment pattern at MODIS scale, Texas savannas are divided into arid savanna (MAP 735mm).
Analysis of the encroachment of Ashe juniper at its early life stage (initial ~20 years) at local (hectare) scale suggests that water availability has a significant positive effect on the encroachment rate in semi-arid savanna, but not in mesic savanna. In addition, a quadratic relationship was revealed between the encroachment rate and woody plant density in mesic savanna. That is, the encroachment rate increases with woody plant density by a threshold density, then starts decreasing with woody plant density. These results demonstrate that regional context such as rainfall and biological traits of woody species is critical to understand the trend of woody plant encroachment.Geography and the Environmen
