Using remote sensing and stable isotopes to show changes in land use

Land use activities have altered natural habitats, establishing new land cover types and effecting the rate and quality of various services provided by the environment. Evaluating the causes and the consequences of changes in land use and land cover is becoming an urgent need for more than the academic research community. Based on the principle of superposition it is possible to use the isotopic signatures in sediment cores to infer historic land cover. By comparison, remote sensing devices collect data multiple times for any give year making it possible to determine the spatial extent of various ground features or even quantify seasonal changes in ground cover. Combining these two methods will allow for a much more comprehensive description of the land use and historic land cover.

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Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-03-17 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:36:24.