Background:
John is a recently graduated Forestry major.
He worked with me as a Forestry Honors student on a Sponsored
Projects Undergraduate Research Project (SPUR) using GIS, GPS and field
work to relocate VTM plots on Mt. Diablo. He is now a ESPM Graduate Student.
Research
overview:
Databases of historical ecological data have proved useful
in modern ecological research for reconstructing early environmental
and vegetation community conditions, studying disturbance regimes
over long temporal scales, and examining change to vegetation communities
over decadal and longer temporal scales. The California Vegetation
Type Mapping (VTM) project began in 1926 and continued for over
ten years. During this time, Albert Everett Wieslander and a group
of others mapped nearly 16 million ha (nearly 41 million acres)
of California’s vegetation covering most of the wild areas
of the state exclusive of the deserts and the larger agricultural
areas. We have digitized and geo-referenced the plot data (which
includes floristic detail), and the plot maps (which help re-locate
the original plots), and the dataset is available via the web. In
this project we will examine change to vegetation since 1930s using
VTM plot data and plot maps across a gradient of land management.
We will relocate VTM plots using historic maps and Global Positioning
Systems (GPS), resurvey vegetation and take photographs in different
study areas around the SF Bay Area that represent different management
regimes: a State Park (e.g. Mt. Diablo), areas at the wildland-urban
interface (e.g. Berkeley Hills); and areas under municipal control
(e.g. Marin Municipal Water District). All data will be managed
in a Geographic Information System (GIS), and analysis of change
in vegetation community will be analyzed using R and Excel.
His project website is here.
Contact
information:
John Dingman
University
of California, Berkeley
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Berkeley, CA 94720
