Publications

The Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout Oncorhynchus clarkii virginalis (RGCT ) occupies just 12% of its ancestral range. As the southernmost subspecies of Cutthroat Trout, we expect a warming climate to bring additional stressors to RGCT populations, such as increased stream temperatures, reduced streamflows, and increased incidence of wildfire. We developed a Bayesian network (BN ) model using...

Fire science emphasizes that mitigation actions on residential property, including structural hardening and maintaining defensible space, can reduce the risk of wildfire at a home. Accordingly, a rich body of social science literature investigates the determinants of wildfire risk mitigation behaviors of residents living in fire-prone areas. Here, we investigate relationships among...

Scenario planning is a useful tool for identifying key vulnerabilities of ecological systems to changing climates, informed by the potential outcomes for a set of divergent, plausible, and relevant climate scenarios. We evaluated potential vulnerabilities of grassland communities to changing climate in the Southern Great Plains (SGP) and the Landscape Conservation Design pilot area (LCD)...

The Sage Grouse Centrocercus urophasianus is a species of conservation concern throughout its range in western North America. Since the 1950s, the high count of males at leks has been used as an index for monitoring populations. However, the relationship between this lek‐count index and population size is unclear, and its reliability for assessing population trends has been questioned...

The eastern North American white oaks, a complex of approximately 16 potentially interbreeding species, have become a classic model for studying the genetic nature of species in a syngameon. Genetic work over the past two decades has demonstrated the reality of oak species, but gene flow between sympatric oaks raises the question of whether there are conserved regions of the genome that...

In the taxonomic world, the oaks are known as a rambunctious group, notorious for hybridizing. In this report, we present preliminary information to address the question of how much hybridization is occurring between bur oak and white oaks with which it is sympatric, through rangewide sampling of bur oak and five co-occurring species: white oak (Q. alba L.), swamp white oak (Q. bicolor...

Oak trees host an amazing diversity of insects, many of which specialize on Quercus species. Oak species and genotypes are commonly planted far from where an acorn was produced. Urban plantings, restoration sites, and plantings anticipating climate change each cause this to happen. What evidence exists that provenance of oak plantings affects herbivores such as galls and leaf miners? And...

Often, factors that determine the risk of an environmental hazard occur at landscape scales, and risk mitigation requires action by multiple private property owners. How property owners respond to risk mitigation on neighboring lands depends on whether mitigation actions are strategic complements or strategic substitutes. We test for these neighbor interactions with a case study on...

No abstract available.

Agri-tourism and rural outdoor recreation are positioned at an important intersection between agricultural, natural resource, economic development and rural issues. This chapter summarizes some of the important dynamics of these sectors, including the role of land use, regional drivers, motivations for farmers and travelers, and economic impacts. As a means to illustrate several key...

Questions Gradients of fire severity in dry conifer forests can be associated with variation in understory floristic composition. Recent work in dry conifer forests in California, USA, has suggested that more severely burned stands contain more thermophilic taxa (those associated with warmer and drier conditions), and that forest disturbance may therefore accelerate floristic shifts...

Population monitoring is important for investigating a variety of ecological questions, and N-mixture models are increasingly used to model population size (N) and trends (lambda) while estimating detectability (p) from repeated counts within primary periods (when populations are closed to changes). Extending these models to dynamic processes with serial dependence across primary periods...