Adam J. McLane

University of Calgary · Department of Geography

While much is known about the relationship between Clark’s nutcracker and whitebark pine, information on nutcracker energetic behavioural strategies − the driving factors behind nutcracker emigration − and the impact of nutcracker behaviour on whitebark pine communities remain uncertain. To investigate nutcracker energetic behaviour, we developed a...

Modern ecological models often account for the influence of the surrounding environment by using landscape pattern indices (LPIs) as measures of landscape structure. Ideally, the landscape samples from which these LPIs are extracted should be centered on the locations where the response variable was measured. However, in situations where this is no...

Conservation planning of critical habitats for wildlife species at risk is a priority topic that requires the knowledge of how animals select and use their habitat, and how they respond to future developmental changes in their environment. This paper explores the role of a habitat-modeling methodological approach, agent-based modeling, which we adv...

Remote sensing plays a key role in landscape monitoring, but our handling of these data in a multi-temporal time series is not yet fully developed. Of particular concern is the presence of spatial and thematic errors in independently created maps that distort measures of landscape pattern and constrain the reliability of change analysis. In additio...

We performed a series of empirical experiments designed to refine the processing of discrete-return profiling light detection and ranging (lidar) data for the purpose of estimating canopy closure across a broad range of forest conditions in west-central Alberta, Canada. The following three methodological conclusions were obtained: (i) a new lineseg...

Investigations of land-cover change often employ metrics designed to quantify changes in landscape structure through time, using analyses of land cover maps derived from the classification of remote sensing images from two or more time periods. Unfortunately, the validity of these landscape pattern analyses (LPA) can be compromised by the presence...

Bitemporal change analysis strategies performed in an object-based environment are prone to the generation of sliver objects: small, spurious polygons created by the inconsistent delineation of persistent change features appearing in consecutive coregistered images. The issue represents a serious methodological challenge that can limit the visual a...