Hoh Rain Forest

Robert A. Norheim: Thesis

Is there an answer to mapping old growth?

An examination of two projects conducted with remote sensing and GIS

"We have not succeeded in answering all your problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things."

I am pleased to report that I am the winner of the 1997 Edward L. Ullman prize, awarded by the Geography Department each year for excellence of the thesis, overall scholarship, and service to the department.

My paper Dueling databases is a nice digest of many of the institutional context issues I brought up in the thesis.

The paper Why so different goes further into a comparison of the technical details of the two projects.

The paper Distinguishing positional and attribute error in two old growth forest mapping projects is a further exploration into the geometric and topological nature of the disagreements betweeen the two projects' results.

Here are several goodies from my thesis:

Map of the study area: National Parks and Forests in the Pacific Northwest (20K GIF)
Abstract
Outline
Research question
Organization of thesis
One of my most important results was simply that the geographic scope of the two projects was very different, and thus that the originally published numbers are not really directly comparable. This section describes some of the geographic discrepancies and shows "corrected" numbers for the two projects, i.e., old growth acreages for only the areas both projects mapped. These two maps show some of these geographic discrepancies:
Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie NF: Discrepancies in projects' treatment of lands administered by other NFs (30K GIF)
Differing treatments east of Cascade Crest (18K GIF)
Results of an overlay of the two projects (confusion matrices) The following maps show the overlay results graphically. This link jumps to the discussion of the maps in the overlay results page.
Olympic National Forest (45K GIF)
Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest (113K GIF)
Gifford Pinchot National Forest (77K GIF)
Mt. Hood National Forest (53K GIF)
Closeup of Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest (46K GIF)
Summary of results
Bibliography (partial)

The University of Washington issued a press release about my thesis and the "Dueling Databases" paper.

Book signing icon If you have any comments or questions about my thesis, please leave me a note in my guest book or send me an email. Mailbox icon

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Hoh Rain Forest

Robert A. Norheim: Thesis

Is there an answer to mapping old growth?

An examination of two projects conducted with remote sensing and GIS

Last updated: August 2, 1999