Publications

Understanding how natural and anthropogenic processes affect population dynamics of species with patchy distributions is critical to predicting their responses to environmental changes. Despite considerable evidence that demographic rates and dispersal patterns vary temporally in response to an array of biotic and abiotic processes, few applications of metapopulation theory have sought...

No abstract available.

The relict plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides subsp. monilifera) forest along the Missouri River between Lakes Sakakawea and Oahe includes trees as large as two meters in diameter. We cored 24 of these trees to determine their age and suitability for flow reconstruction. Because most of the trees were rotten in the center, we developed a method to estimate the date of the center ring...

Plants commonly employ indirect resistance to reduce herbivory by provisioning predatory arthropod populations with additional resources. Numerous predatory arthropods consume pollen that is entrapped on dense, wooly trichomes of plants. Over two seasons, we supplemented pollen on the wooly leaves of turkey mullein, Croton setiger, in natural populations to determine if pollen entrapped...

Habitat loss and degradation are leading causes of biodiversity declines, therefore assessing the capacity of created mitigation wetlands to replace habitat for wildlife has become a management priority. We used single season occupancy models to compare the occurrence of larvae of four species of pond‐breeding amphibians in wetlands created for mitigation, wetlands impacted by road...

The Great Dismal Swamp (GDS) is a large temperate swamp in Virginia/North Carolina with peat soils historically resistant to microbial decomposition. However, this peatland has been subject to ~200 years of disturbance during which extensive drainage, fire suppression, and wide-spread logging have increased decomposition and dramatically decreased the distribution of Atlantic white cedar...

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...