Remote sensing of plant phenophases and pulsed ecosystem dynamics for wildlife ecological applications

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Our understanding of wildlife-habitat interactions and other aspects of natural ecosystem functioning is currently limited by our capacity to observe complex environmental attributes frequently and over large areas. While remote sensing has long been identified as a key technology for supporting ecological applications, its effective use in multi-disciplinary projects is not yet fully developed. This work is designed to generate the tools and processing strategies necessary to help scientists observe phenological patterns - periodically recurrent events such as spring budburst, berry emergence, or autumn senescence - over very large areas using regular observations from earth-orbiting satellites. Specific challenges to be addressed include (i) determining the cumulative temperature thresholds beyond which key wildlife food plants reach various stages of phenological development; (ii) establishing field sites to observe the progression of annual plant development cycles on the ground; (iii) developing the digital-image-processing strategies that will allow technicians to extract phenological measurements from noisy satellite data; (iv) calibrating and validating statistical models that enable us to predict the phenology of specific plants underneath the forest canopy using remote sensing; and (v) investigating how wildlife such as grizzly bear, elk, and caribou respond to changing patterns of food plant distribution throughout the growing season. The results of this work will contribute to management and conservation of wildlife, and is intended to assist anyone dealing with remote sensing technology in an ecological context.