Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Phantoms on the land : animals, ghost trails, and wilderness in Yellowstone National Park(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2016) Clement, Kerri Keller; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Tim LeCain; Catherine Dunlop (co-chair)Yellowstone National Park is a landscape of ghosts, with a plethora of purposefully unmapped trails in the sea of wilderness. These pathways and the associated maps that silence them unveil the lost stories of the manufacturing of a wild Yellowstone. Early Park administrators constructed a distorted cartographic narrative of a wilderness, one safely devoid of Native Americans and teeming with wildlife and geysers, ready for consumption by Euro-Americans. In comparing the contemporary landscape archive with cartographic sources that span early Euro-American fur trappers to the Army period in the Park, this paper traces the construction of Yellowstone wilderness through the emphasis on trails and wilderness landscapes. Ghost trails, present on the land but not depicted on maps, were an attempt by the mapmakers to create and control a uniform wilderness within the confines of Park boundaries. Maps by William Clark, John Dougherty, and Jim Bridger, along with exploration maps by W.W. de Lacy, administrative maps by P.W. Norris, and road maps by the Army Corps of Engineers, expose trail erasures that solidified a Euro-American wild Park. In revealing these cartographic exorcisms, we gain a better understanding of the formation of the Park and its resulting mythology as a remote wilderness, along with the materialization of power over the region's complex identity. Ghost trails expose traces of human values, notions of territoriality, and power over identity that attests to the complexities of demarcating and constructing Yellowstone National Park as a wilderness area.Item Effects of trail-use under forests in the Madison Range, Montana(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 1973) Dale, Donn RichardItem Environmental factors influencing recreational trail condition(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1994) Urie, Wendi AnnItem Edge effects : native and non-native plant distribution along single use and multi-use trails in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, California(Montana State University - Bozeman, Graduate School, 2011) Esby, Eric Matthew Siket; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Peggy Taylor.Recreational impacts (such as hiking, biking, and horseback riding) on surrounding biotic communities are dictated by trail usage, where trails are the major transportation system and facility most commonly found in protected areas. The distribution of trails can contribute to the introduction of non-native species and a reduction in leaf litter through repeated trampling. As such, these impacts associated with trails are a major concern for park managers. The following questions were addressed within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (a federally managed protected area in southern California): (1) Will trailside (edge) vegetation have more exotic species (species richness and abundance) compared interior vegetation along single-use (hiker-only) trails and multi-use trails? (2) Will chaparral or coastal sage scrub communities (CSS) for each trail type exhibit differential plant community diversity and composition due to their differences in litter cover? Trailside vegetation significantly differed in native/exotic species richness and composition from interior vegetation demonstrating an edge effect on both types of trails and in both plant communities. Not only was there a significant increase in trailside exotic species richness and composition in comparison to interior vegetation, multi-use trails exhibited a significantly higher proportion of exotic species richness and composition along the trailside in comparison to the trailside along single-use trails. Additionally, coastal sage scrub plant communities exhibited significantly lower mean percent litter cover, as well as significantly higher exotic species richness and composition along the trailside as compared to the trailside in chaparral communities. Implications from this study argue for the wisdom of concentrating use and impact on a small portion of a recreation area due to rapid impact and slow recovery of certain vegetation types (i.e., CSS). Therefore results from this study would suggest concentrating multi-use trails on chaparral habitats rather than CSS habitats.Item Physiographic components of trail erosion(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2000) Godwin, Ian Chandler Paterson; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Andrew MarcusNo previous study has sought to discriminate between soil erosion and soil compaction when explaining the "missing" cross-sectional areas of incised trails, assuming instead that erosion was the dominant process. Separating the two processes of erosion and compaction is critical to understanding the relationship between physiographic variables and the structure of trails. The purposes of this project are to estimate the relative effects of compaction and erosion on trail cross sectional area along the New World Gulch Trail, Montana, and to better understand the relationship between erosion, compaction, local topography, vegetation, soil bulk density, and soil texture. The following hypotheses were addressed: 1) adjusting the incised cross sectional area of a trail, by removing the effects of soil compaction, will increase the amount of variance in erosion explained by collected physiographic variables; and 2) inclusion of soil bulk density and soil texture as physiographic variables will increase the amount of variance in cross-sectional area explained along the trail. The goals of this study required the collection of field data, analysis of soil samples, and statistical analysis of data. Soil samples and other field measurements were collected over several months during the summer and fall of 1994. Some of the topographic information used in the statistical analysis originated in Urie's (1994) study of recreational trails. The determination of trail slope as one of the primary components of trail incision is consistent with previous studies. Soil water content is the second most significant independent variable when the percentage of particle sizes are not considered. Percent vegetative cover is also significant in the stepwise regression, although it is not significantly correlated to cross-sectional area. The most significant variable added to those already studied was soil bulk density. When individual variables were regressed against the measured cross-sectional area, off-trail soil bulk density accounted for the second greatest amount of variance (r2 = 0.12) after trail slope (r2 = 0.35). The ratio of on-trail soil bulk density to off-trail soil bulk density, which could be considered a measure of compaction, accounted for even more variance (r2 = 0.18) than soil bulk density.