Publications

Federal land management agencies provide stewardship over much of the rangelands in the arid andsemi-arid western United States, but they often lack data of the proper spatiotemporal resolution andextent needed to assess range conditions and monitor trends. Recent advances in the blending of com-plementary, remotely sensed data could provide public lands managers with the needed...

Designated protected areas are diverse in scope and purpose and have expanded from Yellowstone National Park in the United States, the world’s first national park, to 157,897 parks and protected areas distributed globally. Most are publicly owned and serve multiple needs that reflect regional or national cultures. With ever-increasing threats to the integrity of protected areas, managers...

Energy development, in combination with other environmental stressors, poses a persistent threat to rare species endemic to energy-producing regions of the western United States. Demographic analyses of monitored populations can provide key information on the natural dynamics of threatened plant and animal populations and how these dynamics might be affected by present and future...

The impacts of introduced northern pike (Esox lucius) on salmonid populations have attracted much attention because salmonids are popular subsistence, sport and commercial fish. Concern over the predatory effects of introduced pike on salmonids is especially high in Southcentral Alaska, where pike were illegally introduced to the Susitna River basin in the 1950s. We used pike abundance...

Dispersal is an inherently spatial process that can be affected by habitat conditions in sites encountered by dispersers. Understanding landscape resistance to dispersal is important in connectivity studies and reserve design, but most existing methods use resistance functions with cost parameters that are subjectively chosen by the investigator. We develop an analytic approach allowing...

Rural landscapes in the Andes are characterized by an impressive diversity of natural environments and by multiple resource assets. This is particularly the case in the tropical realm where the ecological altitudinal zones of the tierra caliente, the tierra templada, the tierra fria and the tierra helada offer a remarkable range of agricultural potential. This is complemented by a...

Wildfire damages to private residences in the United States and elsewhere have increased as a result of expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) and other factors. Understanding this unwelcome trend requires analytical frameworks that simulate how various interacting social, economic, and biophysical factors influence those damages. A methodological framework is developed for...

The Williston Basin, which includes parts of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in the United States and the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada, has been a leading domestic oil and gas producing region for more than one-half a century. Currently, there are renewed efforts to develop oil and gas resources from deep geologic formations, spurred by advances in recovery...

Aquaculture and hatchery industries are in need of effective control methods to reduce the risk of spreading aquatic invasive species, such as the Asian clam Corbicula fluminea, through aquaculture and hatchery activities. The planktonic nature of Asian clam veligers enables this life stage to enter water-based infrastructure undetected, including hatchery trucks used to stock fish. Once...

We quantified patterns of population genetic structure to help understand gene flow among elk populations across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We sequenced 596 base pairs of the mitochondrial control region of 380 elk from eight populations. Analysis revealed high mitochondrial DNA variation within populations, averaging 13.0 haplotypes with high mean gene diversity (0.85). The...

No abstract available.

Quantifying the effectiveness of management actions to mitigate the effects of changing climatic conditions (i.e., climate adaptation) can be difficult, yet critical for conservation. We used population genetic data from 1984 to 2011 to assess the degree to which ambient climatic conditions and targeted suppression of sources of nonnative Rainbow Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss have influenced...