Biodiversity and grassland changes in Great Plains

In North America grasslands provide vital services on which human depend. The loss of grassland biodiversity has caused significant impacts on ecosystem productivity, resulting in loss of food production, fresh water supply and provision of organisms. It remains difficult to develop predictions and ecological forecast in responses to environmental and climate changes. Our long-term research goal is to develop data integration and modeling approaches for synthetic research on ecological changes from local to continental scales. Our rationale for this project is that the integration of ground observation system and airborne/satellite observation platform across environmental gradients will provide a necessary framework to identify trans-scaling properties from local to continental extrapolation.

Identifying and Prioritizing Habitat for Pheasant Conservation and Management in Agriculturally Dominated Landscapes

The aims of this project are:
  1. to determine minimum habitat thresholds and configurations necessary to support pheasant populations by examining region-specific relationships between pheasant abundance and the density of suitable pheasant habitat;
  2. Estimate the ‘scale of effect’ at which pheasant populations respond to spatially targeted land management and thereby assess the respective value of individual habitat patches to pheasants to aid in prioritization of future conservation efforts;
  3. Forecast pheasant population densities under varying levels of suitable pheasant habitat availability using a modeling and structured decision-making (SDM) framework