Date of Award

2013

Degree Name

Geography

College

College of Liberal Arts

Type of Degree

M.S.

Document Type

Thesis

First Advisor

Anita Walz

Second Advisor

Ralph Oberly

Third Advisor

James Leonard

Abstract

With the increasing influence in climate change and human activity, more and more people have begun to recognize the benefits of wetlands. However, there was a continuous annual net loss in the wetlands area since 1980s. Many programs have been implemented to monitor the status and trend of wetlands recently. In West Virginia, the wetlands area is a small portion of the State’s land, but it plays a key role in the whole ecosystem. This research aimed to detect the land cover and vegetation changes focusing on Canaan Valley area, which represents the greatest wetlands area of West Virginia. Remote sensing datasets and GIS were used to analyze the trend change with the supervised maximum likelihood classification and Post-classification change detection methods. The potential causes of wetland loss were analyzed after the classification.

Subject(s)

Habitat (Ecology).

Wetlands - Ecology.

Wetlands - West Virginia - Canaan Valley (W. Va.).

Canaan Valley, (W. Va.)

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