Joan Bunbury

Bio: Joan Bunbury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her research fields are biogeography and paleoclimatology, and she utilizes organisms preserved in freshwater environments to address questions about past climate and past environmental change.

Assessing 20 Years of Land Use and Land Cover Change on Upper Midwest Lakes

Thirty-three lakes in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa were sampled for water chemistry and freshwater organisms between 1987 and 1994 and again in 2013. Using data from the National Land Cover Dataset (1992) and National Land Cover Database (2011), a geospatial comparative analysis was performed to quantify changes in land use and land cover between these two sampling periods. These results, and a multivariate analysis incorporating water chemistry and land use variables will be presented.

land cover change, Upper Midwest, lakes, ordination analysis