A historically unprecedented mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak affected western Montana during the past decade. We examined radial growth rates (AD 1860-2007/8) of co-occurring mature healthy and MPB-infected ponderosa pine trees collected at two sites (Cabin Gulch and Kitchen Gulch) in western Montana and: (1) compared basal area increment (BAI) values within populations and between sites; (...

R e m o t e sensing data from the NOAA-11 A VHRR satellite were collected over the USDA-Agricultural Research Service Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed in southeastern Arizona during the MONSOON 90 field campaigns. An energy balance model which relies primarily on remotely sensed inputs was used to extrapolate evapotranspiration (ET) estimates from one location containing near-surface meteoro...

T summer of 1949 was long and dry in Montana. On the afternoon of August 5th—the hottest day ever recorded in the state—a lightning fire was spotted in a remote area of pine forest. A parachute brigade of fifteen firefighters known as smoke jumpers was dispatched to put out the blaze; the man in charge was named Wag Dodge. When the jumpers left Missoula, in a C-47 cargo plane, they were told th...

Efficient numerical simulation of process interactions between infiltration and Hortonian runoff is needed to evaluate patterns of internal state variables and fluxes within a watershed. A fully distributed rainfallerunoff model was developed for event-based studies of spaceetime watershed processes. A routing hierarchy was defined over the watershed using the D-infinity contributing area algor...

Topography and land cover characteristics can have significant effects on infiltration, runoff, and erosion processes on watersheds. The ability to model the timing and routing of surface water and erosion is affected by the resolution of the digital elevation model (DEM). High resolution ground-based Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR) technology can be used to collect detailed topographic and...

Data describing long-term sediment yield rates on semiarid rangeland watersheds are relatively rare. To augment existing data and gain a better understanding of the controlling variables, sediment yields from 8 subwatersheds within the US Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed in southeastern Arizona were computed from stock pond sediment acc...

The application of an airborne electronically steered thinned array L-band radiometer (ESTAR) for soil moisture mapping was investigated over the semiarid rangeland Walnut Gulch Watershed located In southeastern Arizona. During the experiment, antecedent rainfall and evaporation were very dif ferent and resulted in a wide range of soil moisture conditions. The high spatial variability of rainfa...

The copula–entropy theory combines the entropy theory and the copula theory. The entropy theory has been extensively applied to derive the most probable univariate distribution subject to specified constraints by applying the principle of maximum entropy. With the flexibility to model nonlinear dependence structure, parametric copulas (e.g., Archimedean, extreme value, meta-elliptical, etc.) ha...