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- Dawson, Samantha K., et al.
(författare)
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Remote Sensing Measures Restoration Successes, but Canopy Heights Lag in Restoring Floodplain Vegetation
- 2016
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Ingår i: Remote Sensing. - : MDPI AG. - 2072-4292. ; 8:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Wetlands worldwide are becoming increasingly degraded, and this has motivated many attempts to manage and restore wetland ecosystems. Restoration actions require a large resource investment, so it is critical to measure the outcomes of these management actions. We evaluated the restoration of floodplain wetland vegetation across a chronosequence of land uses, using remote sensing analyses. We compared the Landsat-based fractional cover of restoration areas with river red gum and lignum reference communities, which functioned as a fixed target for restoration, over three time periods: (i) before agricultural land use (1987-1997); (ii) during the peak of agricultural development (2004-2007); and (iii) post-restoration of flooding (2010-2015). We also developed LiDAR-derived canopy height models (CHMs) for comparison over the second and third time periods. Inundation was crucial for restoration, with many fields showing little sign of similarity to target vegetation until after inundation, even if agricultural land uses had ceased. Fields cleared or cultivated for only one year had greater restoration success compared to areas cultivated for three or more years. Canopy height increased most in the fields that were cleared and cultivated for a short duration, in contrast to those cultivated for >12 years, which showed few signs of recovery. Restoration was most successful in fields with a short development duration after the intervention, but resulting dense monotypic stands of river cooba require future monitoring and possibly intervention to prevent sustained dominance. Fields with intensive land use histories may need to be managed as alternative, drier flood-dependent vegetation communities, such as black box (Eucalyptus largiflorens) grasslands. Remotely-sensed data provided a powerful measurement technique for tracking restoration success over a large floodplain.
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| 2. |
- Thompson, Samantha J., et al.
(författare)
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HARS3 for a Roboticized Isaac Newton Telescope
- 2016
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Ingår i: GROUND-BASED AND AIRBORNE INSTRUMENTATION FOR ASTRONOMY VI. - : SPIE. - 9781510601963
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present a description of a new instrument development, HARPS3, planned to be installed on an upgraded and roboticized Isaac Newton Telescope by end-2018. HARPS3 will be a high resolution (R similar or equal to 115,000) echelle spectrograph with a wavelength range from 380-690 nm. It is being built as part of the Terra Hunting Experiment {a future 10 year radial velocity measurement programme to discover Earth-like exoplanets. The instrument design is based on the successful HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6m ESO telescope and HARPS-N on the TNG telescope. The main changes to the design in HARPS3 will be: a customised fibre adapter at the Cassegrain focus providing a stabilised beam feed and on-sky fibre diameter approximate to 1.4 arcsec, the implementation of a new continuous flow cryostat to keep the CCD temperature very stable, detailed characterisation of the HARPS3 CCD to map the effective pixel positions and thus provide an improved accuracy wavelength solution, an optimised integrated polarimeter and the instrument integrated into a robotic operation. The robotic operation will optimise our programme which requires our target stars to be measured on a nightly basis. We present an overview of the entire project, including a description of our anticipated robotic operation.
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