Patterns of Forest Establishment in the Darhad valley, Mongolia

I hope to continue the research I began in the OEFS course during Spring semester, 2007. Subsequent to my summer field season, I plan to incorporate ground truth data into my image classification and interpretation efforts. My final product will be part of my masters thesis and will provide both an important reference for my audience/peers who are not familiar with the region as well as for my personal interpretation of the data to be collected this summer. I am additionally interested in desigining a simple model predicting future patterns of forest expansion and contraction along the ecotone boundary of steppe-Boreal forest. The images I generate may be included in this model.