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The American West is home to vast landscapes still capable of supporting long-distance ungulate migrations. In Wyoming, herds of big game traverse rugged topography, covering distances of up to 150 miles to reach vital seasonal habitats. These migrations pose significant conservation challenges, as they require animals to cross multiple-use lands, some of which are rapidly changing. Our ability to study ungulate migration has been greatly advanced by high-resolution tracking data, coupled with remote sensing of large landscapes. This presentation will explore how these new GIS tools have deepened our understanding of ungulate migration ecology and led to more effective conservation strategies. While it has long been recognized that ungulates migrate to optimize access to forage, recent tracking studies provide compelling evidence that ungulates “surf the green wave” of forage as it moves along elevational and latitudinal gradients. In fact, evidence suggests that the movements of ungulates are finely tuned to various aspects of the seasonally changing landscapes they inhabit. Amid this new understanding of migration ecology, researchers have identified numerous factors that threaten existing migrations. A pervasive threat is linear infrastructure and other forms of development that constrain the free movement of animals. Several studies demonstrate that development within migration corridors can reduce their functionality, impacting the ability of ungulates to surf the green wave, with likely demographic consequences. Fortunately, as new threats have been identified, innovative methods to map migrations based on empirical tracking data have been developed and widely implemented across the West and globally. New GIS tools, used in various digital atlases, have enabled the sharing of detailed migration maps for the first time and provided a proactive way to support effective conservation and sustain ungulate migrations.
Workforce development continues to be a priority topic in the geospatial industry. The challenges have been set out --but what are the pathways forward? The panel will discuss some of the opportunities working in the near term, as well as what the future make look like given the rapid pace of change in geospatial technology, as well as new dimensions such as AI.
Angela Lee is the Director of Education Solutions at Esri. She leads outreach to educators, students, and administrators, and promotes a geographic approach to learning and problem solving. She also manages Esri’s product offerings for educational institutions. As a liaison between... Read More →
The Sage Grande Testbed (SGT) is NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure for exploring new AI techniques, edge computing, advanced sensing, robotic actuation, and generative AI. The testbed will deploy 300 nodes across the nation exploring AI for wildfire detection, drought monitoring for agriculture, and new AI algorithms. SGT is an open testbed and a NAIRR demonstration project, open to users.
Presenters: Pete Beckman, Northwestern University and Neal Conrad, Argonne National Lab
