DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Spatial heterogeneity of ecosystems: using airborne remote sensing and ecoinformatics to understand the role of scale in plant communities

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This doctoral dissertation improvement project will use high-resolution remotely sensed data from aircraft to map plant species distributions and vegetation structure in the mediterranean-type ecosystem of Santa Cruz Island, California. The project will test the hypothesis that heterogeneity in plant occurrences is explained by both environmental variables and the dispersal abilities of the plants and that the relative importance of environment vs. dispersal will be related to the spatial scale at which the plant communities are examined.This work will contribute to the further development of techniques to assess fine-scale detail of plant communities from remotely-sensed data. It will also contribute to our understanding of processes determining plant species distributions, which is important for developing effective restoration and conservation projects.