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Item Nature unbound: what gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias tell us about large landscape conservation(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Wright, Will Michael; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeThis dissertation examines how and why people of different nationalities across North America cooperate, or not, in conserving transborder ecologies. This project is important because many species of wildlife have been moving across administrative and national borders to cope with a warming world. Out of four thousand species recently tracked, scientists documented that almost three-quarters of them had shifted their ranges, mostly to cooler lands and waters. Terrestrial species, on average, were moving 12 miles (20 kilometers) toward the poles every decade. As the world heats up, threatened biota need more freedom of movement, greater flexibility with borders, to adapt and adjust. My research objective became to recover a useable past about three focal species--gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias--reflecting how these lifeforms were pivotal to the making, unmaking, and remaking of borders for a layering process, a thick cartography, in written word. Conserving large landscapes for each species takes us outside the international lines of modern maps, from the U.S.-Canada border, to the U.S.- Mexico border, to the treaty borders of Indigenous nations subsumed within the United States. My argument is that state-centered conservation followed the possessive logic of nation-building, creating borders and bounding space to protect habitats. New scientific practices such as radio-collaring wolves, tagging monarchs, and tree-ring dating sequoias rendered visible non-human geographies that did not fit the shape or size of traditional protected areas. Civil society in Canada, Mexico, and United States then rallied behind alternative ways of organizing space, building transnational connections for biological well-being. In short, I investigate how non-state actors on the community level reconciled legal, administrative, and national borders with biocentric borders over the long twentieth century (1850s to present). Civic groups like the binational Yellowstone-to-Yukon Initiative, trinational Insect Migration Association, and multinational Indigenous Fire Collective arrived at a political imaginary in-the-making that I call 'ecological internationalism.' Once recognized, its strategy becomes obvious: forge solidarity across borders or face extinction of shared species. Ecological internationalism offers us both a version of the past and a vision of the future.Item Does the establishment of broadcast milkweed seeds versus containerized plugs differ in Willamette Valley restoration plots?(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Tierney, Kelly Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Greg FrancisMonarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus plexippus) have been petitioned for conservation through listing under the Endangered Species Act. In the Willamette Valley, showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) acts as monarch natal and feeding ground habitat. Today, restoration ecologists are including showy milkweed in the suite of species used in prairie restoration projects to bolster the dwindling monarch populations. These biologists often started with including it as a portion of the seed mixes sown as part of a restoration. Later, many of these biologists switched to planting started, containerized plants (plugs) after failing to see much in the way of results from the previous seeding. This study focused on the establishment rate of containerized plugs versus broadcast seeding in restoration plots. Three prairie restoration sites were selected which had been seeded, then planted with plots of containerized plugs. Stems were counted at each site, both within the plug area, and at random across the rest of the site. Results from 2017 indicated planting plugs was more successful than broadcast seeding. However, the random sampling returned no plants and insufficient study design required a reexamination of the study sites in Summer 2018. My science advisor also recommended using the Focused (Intuitive Controlled) Survey method to collect sown milkweed instead to see if the results were different. The 2018 sampling yielded several individuals or clusters of milkweed in the sown sections. These were productive enough that we question which whether plugging milkweed is necessary.Item Inventory and monitoring of biodiversity : an assessment of methods and a case study of Glacier National Park, MT(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1991) Debinski, Diane MarieBiodiversity is currently threatened around the world, yet humankind knows little about its distribution or rates of loss. Because biodiversity can be defined at the level of species, habitats, or genes, temporal changes can be assessed at several different levels. These changes may indicate responses to natural disturbances, human-induced changes, or long-term environmental trends. However, no standard analysis techniques for biodiversity assessment have yet been developed. In order to protect biodiversity or to use it as an indicator of environmental change, baseline data must be collected and analysis techniques must be developed. This research applies and evaluates sampling and analysis techniques for inventory and monitoring of biodiversity. Glacier National Park is used as a case study. Birds and butterflies were chosen to demonstrate species diversity inventory. The butterfly, Euphydryas gillettii, was used to demonstrate genetic diversity assessment. Biodiversity assessment sites were established throughout a range of habitats and monitored during the summers of 1987, 1988 and 1989. Thirty-three sites were monitored for birds and twenty-four sites were monitored for butterflies. Presence/absence sampling was used to classify species commonness and rarity. Goals accomplished included 1) describing the current species composition, 2) identifying diversity hotspots and sites supporting rare species, and 3) creating a baseline for assessing change. A discourse on biodiversity assessment would not be complete, however, without addressing the problems inherent in biodiversity assessment and management. Replication in both time and space is necessary to distinguish natural background variation in species distribution from true changes and sampling artifact. It is often difficult to reconcile the need for sampling replication within a habitat type with the need to survey a large, highly diverse ecosystem. Further, it is extremely difficult to use biodiversity as an environmental indicator unless relationships between species and environmental changes are specific and well-understood. Finally, management for biodiversity requires a large-scale perspective on ecosystem management and a modest understanding of the natural history of the species examined. Unless biodiversity assessments are done thoroughly and carefully, they will have limited descriptive or predictive value.