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The Stephen F. Austin State University Arboretum occupies ten acres of campus property on the banks of LaNana creek, the stream that bisects the campus and the city of Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas. The mission statement of the Arboretum is to promote the conservation, selection and use of the native plants of east Texas. There are 19 species in east Texas that are either federally endangered, state endangered, or in danger of extirpation from the state. Many others face a serious decline in numbers as appropriate habitats diminish. A long-term project of ex situ and in situ conservation was initiated in 1992. Goals include: 1) acquire global position and vegetative analyses of endangered plant communities, 2) utilize ArcCAD® (a PC-GIS software) to archive a collection of maps, photographs, plant community data, and text, 3) maintain an ex situ collection of endangered plants from known provenances in the arboretum, and 4) reintroduction of species into appropriate protected habitats. The project involves the cooperation of several state and federal agencies and integrates the resources of a university horticulture program with the needs of endangered plant conservation.
In Texas, 5,500 native species are distributed over an area comprised of ten regional habitat types. In the Piney Woods region of east Texas, 2,300 plant species occupy 15 million acres. In east Texas, the USFWS has identified 4 species that are federally endangered and 15 that are candidates for that listing. Interest in protecting rare plant habitats and reintroducing those species into similar and appropriate ecosystem types has led to new tools in research and development. Remote sensing is one; this technology is used to derive information about the earth's land and water areas from images acquired at a distance Multispectral and spatial techniques are applied to process and interpret remote sensing imagery for the purpose of producing conventional maps, thematic maps, reource surveys, etc., in the fields of agriculture, botany, archeology, forestry, geography, geology. and others. Remote sensing is used to classify vegetation, interpret forest photogrammetry, estimate timber production, and identify crops, individual plants and leaf structure. This specific project was initiated to determine the potential of remote sensing as a tool to locate known and new rare plant communities in east Texas. To develop benchmark data, a Daedalus scanner image of a previously surveyed and AutoCAD® mapped area, the Vista forest on the SFASU campus, was utilized to develop correlations between imagery, vegetation types and species. By inserting various scan images under the Vista forest AutoCAD® map, known tree species were analyzed through their specific spectral emission characteristics across nine bands. This pilot project has indicated that it is simple to separate pines from hardwoods and illustrate major land use features. However, separation at the species level or groups of species has not been achieved. This paper will trace the history of this project, describe problems and obstacles encountered, and make recommendations for future strategies.
Urban landscape ecology is a new interest that crosses several disciplines: botany, forestry, horticulture, sociology and land use planning. University forest environs are often the most degraded; foot traffic, development and a shortage of funds for significant tree plantings are main culprits. SFASU lies in the pineywoods region of east Texas and is known as the “university among the pines.” The campus is blessed with many patriarch pines and hardwoods. Computer-assisted drafting (CAP) and Geographic Information Systems(GIS) platforms are being utilized to map the campus vegetation. A 1992 vegetative analysis, when compared to similar studies in 1971 and 1983, indicates a loss in species diversity and frequency with little change in basal area. AutoCad*, LandCadd*, and Studio-3D* are being integrated into a multi-disciplinary project to develop a three-dimensional biotic/abiotic model of the campus. That model will be used as a “fly-through” visualization tool to develop forest conservation strategies most likely to succeed in a sustainable fashion.