Publications

Identifying, protecting, and restoring habitats for declining wildlife populations is foundational to conservation and recovery planning for any species at risk of decline. Resource selection analysis is a key tool to assess habitat and prescribe management actions. Yet, it can be challenging to map suitable resource conditions across a wide range of ecological contexts and use the...

Riparian trees and their annual growth rings can be used to reconstruct drought histories related to streamflow. Because the death of individual trees reduces competition for survivors, however, tree-ring chronologies based only on surviving trees may underestimate drought impacts. This problem can be addressed by calculating productivity at the stand scale to account for tree mortality...

Prairie dogs in the western United States experience periodic epizootics of plague, caused by the flea-borne bacterial pathogen Yersinia pestis. An early study indicated that Oropsylla hirsuta (Baker), often the most abundant prairie dog flea vector of plague, seldom transmits Y. pestis by the classic blocked flea mechanism. More recently, an alternative early-phase mode of transmission...

Plant communities in rangeland ecosystems vary widely in the degree to which they can compensate for losses to herbivores. Ecosystem-level factors have been proposed to affect this compensatory capacity, including timing and intensity of grazing, and availability of soil moisture and nutrients. Arid ecosystems are particularly challenging to predict because of their high degree of...

Tissue samples are frequently collected to study various aspects of avian biology, but in many cases these samples are not used in their entirety and are stored by the collector. The already collected samples provide a largely overlooked opportunity because they can be used by different researchers in different biological fields. Broad reuse of samples could result in multispecies or...

Sediment deposition on floodplains is essential for the development and maintenance of riparian ecosystems. Upstream erosion is known to influence downstream floodplain construction, but linking these disparate processes is challenging, especially over large spatial and temporal scales. Sediment fingerprinting is thus a robust tool to establish process linkages between downstream...

Beaver mimicry is a fast-growing conservation technique to restore streams and manage water that is gaining popularity within the natural resource management community because of a wide variety of claimed socio-environmental benefits. Despite a growing number of projects, many questions and concerns about beaver mimicry remain. This study draws on qualitative data from 49 interviews with

Trees are bioindicators of global climate change and regional urbanization, but available monitoring tools are ineffective for fine-scale observation of many species. Using six accelerometers mounted on two urban ash trees (Fraxinus americana), we looked at high-frequency tree vibrations, or change in periodicity of tree sway as a proxy for mass changes, to infer seasonal patterns of...

Invasions of native plant communities by non-native species present major challenges for ecosystem management and conservation. Invasive annual grasses such as cheatgrass, medusahead, and ventenata are pervasive and continue to expand their distributions across imperiled sagebrush-steppe communities of the western United States. These invasive grasses alter native plant communities...

Background Bats of the genus Lasiurus occur throughout the Americas and have diversified into at least 20 species among three subgenera. The hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) is highly migratory and ranges farther across North America than any other wild mammal. Despite the ecological importance of this species as a major insect predator, and the particular susceptibility of lasiurine bats...

Invasive annual grasses (IAGs)—including Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), Taeniatherum caput-medusae (medusahead), and Ventenata dubia (ventenata) species—present significant challenges for rangeland management by altering plant communities, impacting ecosystem function, reducing forage for wildlife and livestock, and increasing fire risk. Numerous spatial data products are used to map IAGs...

Invasive annual grasses (IAGs) degrade native plant communities, alter fire cycles, impact ecosystem processes, and threaten the persistence of some species. Therefore, controlling the spread of IAGs has become a land management priority in the western United States. A wide array of geospatial data has been developed in the last decade to help land managers combat the invasion and...