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MS and/or PhD Assistantships - Global Change and Earth Observation - North Dakota MS or PhD Assistantships are available for the following projects in the Department of Earth System Science and Policy at the University of North Dakota. Applications are encouraged from students with a background and interests in geography, ecology and remote sensing. An interest in learning, or existing skill with, quantitative analysis and programming with IDL or other languages would be an advantage. 1) Assessment of grassland fragmentation and naturalness in North Dakota. There is very little of the original tallgrass prairie left in eastern North Dakota. Most areas of grassland have been disturbed by tillage at some time, and many are composed of exotic cool season pasture grasses. Even the established reserves and remnant areas have reduced biophysical naturalness because the required grazing and burning regimes are costly and intensive to implement. The grassland mosaic is important for wildlife conservation and ecosystem function. This project seeks to use time series of Landsat imagery, ground-collected spectral libraries and periodic collection of Hyperion hyperspectral imagery to assess the fragmentation and biophysical naturalness of grasslands in eastern and central North Dakota. The student will be undertaking substantial amounts of image processing, field measurement and land cover change modeling. The work is complimented by parallel activities in the mixed prairie of Alberta and the post oak woodlands of Texas. 2) Development and assessment of global change impact scenarios for North Dakota. Convincing global change scenarios are largely lacking for the Northern Great Plains. However this region is one of the great "bread-baskets" of the world. North Dakota represents a microcosm of this dynamic with substantial and diverse agricultural production and large existing and future potential sources of energy, combined with a large proportion of the grassland reserves of the USA, a key breeding area for waterfowl, and complex hydrology associated with the Missouri River system and the Prairie Pothole Region. This project seeks to develop coherent global change scenarios for North Dakota that combine climate change predictions with global economic and scenarios that could substantially affect agriculture, energy production, and land cover and ecosystem function. It involves the use of a spatial multi-criteria analysis shell, substantial GIS processing, and transformation of global and regional climate change, economic, social and political scenarios into land use outcomes. These projects can be tailored to MS or PhD program requirements. All students entering the ESSP Program are required to take the compulsory 20 credit ESSP 501 and ESSP 502 courses in the first two semesters. These courses cover the basics of broad earth system science including the Biosphere and Biodiversity, Energy, Environment and Society, the Geosphere and Earth Observation, the Water Cycle and Hydrology, and Biogeochemical Cycles. Information on the Earth System Science and Policy Program is available at: http://www.essp.und.edu/Default.aspx Applications will be considered until June 1, 2009. Students must meet the requirements for GRE, GPA, TOEFL standards (appropriate to MS or PhD) and meet all the requirements of the Graduate School of the University of North Dakota. A 12 - month GRA and full tuition waiver are available for each of these positions. Long term availability is subject to funding. PhD students are expected to write a grant to support their work as part of the process of proposing their dissertation topic. Interested students should contact Dr. Hill directly at the address given below to discuss the projects. Applications must be made directly to the UND Graduate School (http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/). Please do **not** hit the reply button to respond to this email. **************************************************************************** **************************************************************************** **************************************************************************** ********************************** Michael J. Hill, Professor Department of Earth System Science and Policy Clifford Hall Room 314 4149 University Avenue, Stop 9011 University of North Dakota Grand Forks, ND 58202-9007 Tel: 701.777.6071 Fax: 701.777.2940 E-mail. [email protected] **************************************************************************** **************************************************************************** **************************************************************************** **********************************
