Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Effect of hydrology on habitat area in an inland wetland upstream discharge vs extent of greeness in the okavango delta, botswana(Montana State University, 2020) Lenehan, Timothy DW; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Paul HookThe annual flood cycle in Botswana's Okavango Delta is a critical factor in the biodiversity and extensive populations of charismatic wildlife, which sustain a thriving tourism industry. Floodwater originates as precipitation hundreds of kilometers away and is subject to natural losses and human diversion in Angola and Namibia before reaching the Delta. However, increasing populations and corresponding agriculture and industry in these countries has put increased pressure on the Delta's limited water resources, necessitating a clear understanding of how streamflow influences ecosystem processes and services. Therefore, I conducted a multi-year analysis of streamflow data from gauges near the upstream entrance and downstream exit of the Delta combined with a remote sensing analysis of four subareas within the Delta to evaluate the relationship between stream flow, and visually evaluated extent of vegetation and normalized vegetation density index (NDVI). NDVI is a common quantitative measure for green vegetation coverage within a landscape which can also be used as an indicator for extent of habitat available to wildlife. NDVI was higher in years with high flows into and out of the delta than in years with low flows. NDVI is more strongly correlated to stream flow out of the Delta than to streamflow into the Delta, suggesting that water available for flooding is a key driver of green vegetative cover and therefore habitat availability for wildlife. My subjective evaluation of imagery found more consistent differences in vegetation extent between high, medium, and low flow years, suggesting that other approaches to quantitative image analysis might show stronger relationships between hydrology and habitat than NDVI.Item Informing the construction of narrative-based risk communication(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2019) King, Henry William; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Clemente IzurietaThe current communication of flood risk by government agencies and the scientific community to the citizens living in the floodplain is ineffective. Using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), this communication can be enhanced through the use of Hero, Victim, and Victim to Hero character-based narratives. This thesis describes the methods used to inform users of the NPF to construct and test narratives using computational methods. Four natural language processing tasks are described; topic modeling, sentiment analysis, classification, and term frequencies. It was found that using the difference of transformed relative term frequencies produced an adequate vocabulary for each style of narrative. The narratives constructed from these vocabularies were used in work that sought to formalize the narrative construction process and in focus group studies which found that narrative-based scientific messages increased affective response versus traditional scientific messaging.Item Geologic stability of Mystic Lake dam, Gallatin County, Montana, and computer simulation of potential flood hazards from the failure of the dam(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1981) Hayes, Graham Stephen