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Investigating Vegetation in the Phoenix Basin |
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Ecologists have several sophisticated tools for monitoring modern environmental factors. Understanding long-term patterns of ecological change requires an examination of the past. Archaeologists, using dendroclimatic data, can generate and test some hypotheses about pre-historic change. However, this is limited to non-spatial assertions about general climatic patterns for large areas. This study is an attempt to understand the spatial distribution of vegetation health with varying amounts of precipitation in an arid environment. The results will permit researchers to generate maps of vegetation productivity in the Phoenix Basin for the last 1000 years.
The map above shows the location of the study area in Arizona. This area southwest of the Salt-Gila confluence represents a large area with extensive natural vegetation. Urban areas and agricultural fields have been masked out of the data, as illustrated in the map of vegetation biomass below, calculated from a series of Landsat satellite images.
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