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Nathan Piekielek

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Hydrological Analysis of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Montane Meadow Condition using MODIS data
Locating meadow study sitesMeadow centers as recorded in the ‘Copy of sitecords_areaelev from Caruthers thesis.xls’ file delivered by Debinski in November 2012 were matched to polygons as recorded in files ‘teton97map_area.shp’ and ‘gallatin97map_area.shp’ both also delivered by Debinski in November 2012.In cases where the meadow center did not fall within a meadow polygon, if there was a meadow polygon of the same meadow TYPE nearby (judgment was used here), the meadow center was matched with the meadow polygon of same meadow TYPE. In total, 29 of 30 Gallatin meadow sites and 21 of 25 Teton meadow sites were positively located.Identifying meadow pixels for analysisThe native MODIS 250-meter grid was reprojected...
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Locating meadow study sitesMeadow centers as recorded in the ‘Copy of sitecords_areaelev from Caruthers thesis.xls’ file delivered by Debinski in November 2012 were matched to polygons as recorded in files ‘teton97map_area.shp’ and ‘gallatin97map_area.shp’ both also delivered by Debinski in November 2012.In cases where the meadow center did not fall within a meadow polygon, if there was a meadow polygon of the same meadow TYPE nearby (judgment was used here), the meadow center was matched with the meadow polygon of same meadow TYPE. In total, 29 of 30 Gallatin meadow sites and 21 of 25 Teton meadow sites were positively located.Identifying meadow pixels for analysisThe native MODIS 250-meter grid was reprojected...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320712002388): U.S. National Park Service land managers face a variety of challenges to preserving the biodiversity in their parks. A principle challenge is to minimize the impacts of surrounding land use on park condition and biodiversity. In the absence of ideal sets of data and models, the present study develops methods and results that demonstrate a coarse-filter approach to understanding the effects of land use change on habitat types for four pilot study-areas. The area of analysis for each park is defined by a protected-area-centered-ecosystem. Habitat types were defined by biophysical factors assumed to represent the distribution of vegetation...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954115001466): Anticipating the ecological effects of climate change to inform natural resource climate adaptation planning represents one of the primary challenges of contemporary conservation science. Species distribution models have become a widely used tool to generate first-pass estimates of climate change impacts to species probabilities of occurrence. There are a number of technical challenges to constructing species distribution models that can be alleviated by the use of scientific workflow software. These challenges include data integration, visualization of modeled predictor–response relationships, and ensuring that models are reproducible...
Abstract (from http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/12-2174.1): Recent research on mountain-dwelling species has illustrated changes in species' distributional patterns in response to climate change. Abundance of a species will likely provide an earlier warning indicator of change than will occupancy, yet relationships between abundance and climatic factors have received less attention. We tested whether predictors of counts of American pikas ( Ochotona princeps ) during surveys from the Great Basin region in 1994 - 1999 and 2003 - 2008 differed between the two periods. Additionally, we tested whether various modeled aspects of ecohydrology better predicted relative density than did average annual precipitation,...
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