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Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability

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https://hdl.handle.net/10217/100401

These digital collections include theses, dissertations, faculty publications, and datasets from the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability. Due to departmental name changes, materials from the following historical departments are also included here: Cooperative Watershed Management Unit; Earth Resources; Geology.

Of special note are digital copies of materials referenced by emeritus Earth Resources professor James R. Meiman in a literature review titled Little South Poudre Watershed and Pingree Park Campus (Colorado State University, College of Forestry and Natural Resources, 1971). These materials can be found here (re watershed science) and in departmental collections related to forestry, geology, and wildlife biology.

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Browsing Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability by Author "Bailey, Ryan, committee member"

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    Trends and controls on lake color in the high elevation western United States
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Austin, Miles T., author; Ross, Matthew R. V., advisor; Hall, Ed, committee member; Bailey, Ryan, committee member
    Lakes are perceived to be having an increase in algal blooms across the Western United States due to climate change driven and other anthropogenic drivers. Despite this perception, long-term records do not exist for many lakes, so looking at macroscale patterns is challenging. We present and discuss here our results from using a remote sensing dataset, LimnoSat-US. LimnoSat-US contains Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2020. In the intermountain west, our focus study region of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Utah, LimnoSat includes 1,200 lakes and over 150,000 summer observations of water color and reflectance. We used LimnoSat-US to examine what controls lake color and what, if any, changes are occurring lake color, which is a strong indicator of whether a lake is prone to algae blooms. A lake's mean depth and annual temperature were the strongest predictors of whether a lake was, on average, blue and clear or green and murky. Despite the perception of increased algae blooms, we found no consistent evidence of lakes 'greening' or shifting from mostly oligotrophic, blue, and clear to eutrophic, green, and murky. Instead, the vast majority of our lakes (> 80%) had no trend in lake color. Further, we found that our approach did not capture the dominant controls on whether not a lake was shifting from blue to green or green to blue, highlighting the need for additional work.