IBM Final Report: Appendix

Gap analysis of biodiversity in southern California. Presented at the workshop on Managing Natural Landscapes for the Conservation of Biodiversity. San Diego, California, January, 1993.
Gap Analysis of Biodiversity in California, presented to Bureau of Land Management, Sacramento, California, February, 1993.
Gap Analysis of Biodiversity in California, Colloquium presentation to Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, March 1993.
Gap Analysis of Biodiversity in California, presented to California Biodiversity Executive Council, Sacramento, June, 1993.
Using Gap Analysis for ecosystem conservation, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Sacramento, California, July, 1993.
Hierarchical representation of species distributions for biological survey and monitoring. Presented at the Second International Conference/Workshop on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling, Breckenridge, CO, September 26-30, 1993. [Stoms]
The National Biological Survey and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, Banquet address to GIS'93, Denver, November, 1993.
Gap Analysis of Biodiversity in California, Colloquium presentation to Department of Forest Science, Oregon State University, January 1994.
Gap Analysis and Regional Conservation Planning, joint Geography-Planning colloquium, Arizona State University, Tempe, February 1994.
Mapping and monitoring terrestrial biodiversity using GISs, International Symposium on Biodiversity and Terrestrial Ecosystems, Institute of Botany, Academica Sinica, Taipei, March 1994.
Regional and landscape analysis of biodiversity using GIS, Colloquium presentation to the School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, April 1994.
Improving biodiversity data and information flows among scientists, policy makers and managers. 1994 American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) Plenary Session, "Science and Policy: What We Know and What We Need to Know." Knoxville, August 1994.
Gap analysis for the preservation of biological diversity in California, presented to the Sierra Club, Santa Barbara Chapter, September 13, 1994. [Stoms]
Beyond the traditional vegetation map towards a biodiversity database, presented at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, May 24, 1994, Panama City, Panama. [Stoms]
Gap analysis of natural vegetation in southwestern California, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, January, 1995.
A spatial analytical hierarchy for Gap Analysis, Gap Analysis Symposium, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Charlotte, NC, March, 1995.
Applications of Gap Analysis data in the Mojave Desert of California, Gap Analysis Symposium, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Charlotte, NC, March, 1995.
Regional conservation planning in California, Stanford Research Institute Environmental Policy Forum, Stanford University, May, 1995.
Gap analysis of the vegetation of southwest California, Carneggie Institute, Stanford University, May, 1995.
Analysis of GAP data, Annual Meeting of NBS Gap Analysis Investigators, Fayetteville, Arkansas, August, 1995.
Selecting Biodiversity Management Areas, Workshop on statewide biodiversity planning, Defenders of Wildlife, Portland, Oregon, September, 1995.
Regional conservation planning case study: the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, October, 1995.
Regional conservation of global biodiversity, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, October, 1995.
Biodiversity Management Area Selection, conference presentation at the 42nd North American meeting of the Regional Science Association International in Cincinnati, Ohio, October, 1995. [Church]
Biodiversity Management Area Selection, presentation at the Argonne National Lab, Illinois, November, 1995. [Church]

Visitors to the Biogeography Lab

During the four years of the IBM funded project, over 450 visitors toured the UCSB Biogeography Lab and were shown the IBM-donated equipment being applied to conservation problems. These visitors represented academia, various levels of government, non-profit organizations, the media, and the private corporate sector. Visitors came from at least 26 states and 26 foreign countries (Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan).

Student Involvement

Graduate theses and dissertations
Other graduate students
Undergraduate training

Graduate theses and dissertations

Gray, M. V., 1994. A Digital Multipurpose Vegetation Map for the Colorado Desert of California. Masters thesis, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. [currently a Ph.D. student and employed at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at UCSB]

Odion, D., 1995. Effects of variation in soil heating during fire on patterns of plant establishment and regrowth in maritime chaparral. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. [currently employed by Marin Municipal Water District, California. Dennis also compiled the vegetation map for the California portion of the Intermountain Semi-Desert Ecoregion.]

Stine, P. A., 1995. Multiscale biodiversity assessment and reserve design for natural community conservation in southwestern California. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. [currently employed by USGS-Biological Resources Division, Sacramento, California]

Thomas, K. A., 1996. Vegetation and Floristic Diversity in the Mojave Desert of California: A Regional Conservation Evaluation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. [currently employed by USGS-Biological Resources Division, Flagstaff, Arizona]

Thorne, J. H., 1997. Gap Analysis: The vegetation of Northwestern California. Masters thesis, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. [currently employed by National Park Service, Denali National Park, Alaska]

Other graduate students who have been employed by or received training and computing support through the IBM-ERP

Several graduate students in Geography, Biology, and Computer Science received training or support the IBM-ERP grant.

Allan Hollander, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Geography, UCSB. Allan was the primary researcher involved in wildlife habitat modeling, including the analyses of the orange-throated whiptail (Hollander et al. 1994) and wild pigs. He also programmed the graphical user interfaces to the WHR model and the Bayesian pattern recognition for classifying species assemblages into plant communities.

Max Moritz, Ph.D. student, Department of Geography, UCSB. Max was involved in the reserve selection modeling for Research Natural Areas (Moritz et al. 1997, Stoms et al. in review). He also has used the IBM equipment in examining fire history and its relationship with vegetation and potential reserves on National Forest lands.

B. J. Okin, Masters student, Department of Geography, UCSB. B. J. is the primary programmer of the heuristic for the BMAS model used in the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (Davis et al. 1996) and in planning for The Nature Conservancy in the Columbia Plateau.

Dan Sarr, Masters student, Department of Biology, UCSB. While working on the vegetation map for the California GAP, Dan received training in GIS technology and specifically in the design of the GAP database.

Anuradh Sastrianu, Masters student, Department of Computer Science, UCSB. Anuradh investigated various network protocols for distributed databasing and worked on porting Postgres to the IBM RS6000 architecture.

Richard Walker, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Geography, UCSB. Rich has played a key role in developing image processing methods for mapping vegetation and in developing monitoring methods in Yosemite National Park. While completing his dissertation, he is currently employed at American Wildlands, a non-profit conservation organization in Bozeman, Montana.

Undergraduate Training

The following UCSB Biology and Geography students (or recent graduates) were trained in GIS and remote sensing applications in the IBM-ERP lab (parentheses indicate students who went on to graduate school): Dave Court, Josh Graae (UCSB), Nicole Griffin, Curtise Jacoby (Humboldt State University), Melissa Kelly (UCSB), Laurie Schwalm, Yvonne Thompson, Eric Waller (UCSB), Joe Walsh, Katherine Warner, and Dan Wolnick.

Other Technology Transfer

Courses

Information Management: a short course in the design and implementation of biodiversity databases. National Park Service. Presented by F. Davis to the National Park Service Class in Inventory and Monitoring, Ventura CA, August 29, 1994.

Collaborative arrangements

We participated in two meetings organized by Dr. Jim Quinn, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, relating to the use of spatial information for biodiversity assessments. The first meeting was held in April, 1993, with representatives from various state resources agencies, university campuses, and county supervisors. The objective of this meeting was to improve communication between academic researchers and resource managers on research and information priorities and issues. The second working meeting was held in Santa Barbara in June with attendance from the two campuses and the California Department of Fish and Game. Opportunities for future collaboration between the ecological modeling experts at UC Davis and the GIS experts at UCSB were discussed. This led to a joint project to evaluate the accuracy of the predicted GAP wildlife distributions by comparing them to lists of observed species at a series of parks and preserves compiled by Dr. Quinn.

Sequoia 2000 is a large grant from Digital Equipment Corporation to the University of California to support better data management in the U. S. Global Change Research Program. The UCSB Computer Systems Lab (now the Institute for Computational Earth System Science) was one of the UC partners in this project, addressing the problems of organizing, accessing, analyzing, and visualizing massive amounts of diverse data. The pgbrowse tool described above represents one area of collaboration between the Sequoia 2000 and IBM/ERP projects. The cataloging tool was developed to run on both DEC and RS6000 platforms. In addition, the Biogeography Lab computing facility has seamlessly networked the DEC workstations from the Sequoia 2000 project with the RS6000s from the IBM/ERP grant such that users can access files across this distributed network of different platforms without having to worry about file formats, etc.

Several productive meetings were held with Professor Terry Smith of Geography and Computer Science at UCSB. Terry has formulated a modeling and database language (MDBL) for improving spatial analysis. As part of his research, he asked for a couple of applications in spatial modeling that are difficult in current GIS systems. We provided two applications for which his group subsequently generated conceptual solutions. These applications were the problem of representing overlapping objects in GIS, such as fire history data or wildlife species distributions. Current GIS is optimized for answering queries about what are the attributes of a given place, but are less suited to queries about objects composed of pieces from overlapping polygons. The other application was our map generalization problem, where we want to be able to automate the process a skilled cartographer might use to change the scale and resolution of a vegetation map. This procedure involves a complex interaction of both spatial features and their attributes. Terry's work on these problems has helped clarify our formulation of these problems and has demonstrated how his MDBL framework can successfully address real-world spatial problems.

We have also begun informal collaboration with Dr. Rick Condit at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Dr. Condit is an ecologist specializing in population dynamics. We are beginning a project to map forests in the Canal Zone preparatory to a study in which we will attempt to model distributions of tree species across the environmental gradient of the Isthmus of Panama, using some of the techniques developed during the IBM project. The concept is to use GIS modeling to guide strategic sampling design, and then using the results from plots inventoried by the Smithsonian to refine the GIS models.

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