Bureau Approving Official
Office of Science Quality and Integrity
Email:
geneva_chong@usgs.gov
Office Phone:
307-231-1534
ORCID:
0000-0003-3883-5153
Location
Supervisor:
Harry L Jenter
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Remotely sensed elk locations were derived from satellite and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) imagery collected during the winter of 2018 and the winter and spring of 2019 at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming and compared to locations from Global Positioning System (GPS) collars from 2017 - 2019. This data release provides the source, date, time, latitude, and longitude of elk locations and the type of analyses the location data were used for in the accompanying manuscript by Graves and others 2021. DOI will be provided once supplied by the journal.
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Vegetation phenology and productivity play a crucial role in surface energy balance, plant and animal distribution, and animal movement and habitat use and can be measured with remote sensing metrics including start of season (SOS), peak instantaneous rate of green-up date (PIRGd), peak of season (POS), end of season (EOS), and integrated vegetation indices. However, for most metrics, we do not yet understand the agreement of remotely sensed data products with near-surface observations. We also need summaries of changes over time, spatial distribution, variability, and consistency in remote sensing dataset metrics for vegetation timing and quality. We compare metrics from 10 leading remote sensing datasets against...
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Wildlife aggregation patterns can influence disease transmission. However, limited research evaluates the influence of anthropogenic and natural factors on aggregation. Many managers would like to reduce wildlife contact rates, driven by aggregation, to limit disease transmission. We develop a novel analytical framework to quantify how management activities such as supplemental feeding and hunting versus weather drive contact rates while accounting for correlated contacts. We apply the framework to the National Elk Refuge (NER), Wyoming, USA, where the probable arrival of chronic wasting disease (CWD) has magnified concerns. We used a daily proximity index to measure contact rates among 68 global positioning system...
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The mixed mountain shrub community is one of the WLCI priority habitat types and is associated with numerous WLCI conservation priority areas and habitat projects. The current extent and condition of mountain shrub patches is unknown in most of the WLCI region; thus, trends in their condition and mechanisms driving those conditions are also unknown. Ongoing monitoring data from selected stands indicate an overall decline in this community type. Hypotheses as to what is causing the decline range from persistent drought to herbivory and, possibly, factors associated with increased energy development. Our long-term objectives are to measure and map the current conditions and distribution of mixed mountain shrub communities...
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Novel approaches for quantifying density and distributions could help biologists adaptively manage wildlife populations, particularly if methods are accurate, consistent, cost-effective, rapid, and sensitive to change. Such approaches may also improve research on interactions between density and processes of interest such as disease transmission across multiple populations. We assess how satellite imagery, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) imagery, and Global Positioning System (GPS) collar data vary in characterizing elk density, distribution and count patterns across times with and without supplemental feeding at the National Elk Refuge (NER), Wyoming, USA. We also present the first comparison of satellite imagery...
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