Publications

Intensive agricultural activities near prairie wetlands may result in excessive sediment loads, which may bury seed and invertebrate egg banks that are important for maintenance and cycling of biotic communities during wet/dry cycles. Sediment-load experiments indicated that burial depths of 0.5 cm caused a 91.7% reduction in total seedling emergence and a 99.7% reduction in total...

Grassland fragmentation and habitat loss are hypothesized to be contributing to widespread grassland bird declines in North America due to the adverse effects of fragmentation on breeding bird abundance and reproductive success. To assess the effects of fragmentation on the reproductive success of grassland birds, we measured rates of nest predation and brood parasitism for four species...

Wetland basins in the Prairie Pothole Region of the U.S. are commonly modified by excavation (e.g., roadside ditches, stock dugouts), partial drainage (ditching), and diking. Differences in the distribution of modified wetlands may affect the predictive accuracy of waterfowl survey data if such wetlands are not distributed randomly in the landscape and if waterfowl are not distributed...

A large, dark wolf poked his nose out of the pines in Yellowstone National Park as he thrust a broad foot deep into the snow and plowed ahead. Soon a second animal appeared, then another, and a fourth. A few minutes later, a pack of thirteen lanky wolves had filed out of the pines and onto the open hillside. Wolf packs are the main social units of a wolf population. As numbers of wolves...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Impoundments located within river systems in the Northern Great Plains are vulnerable to sediment inputs because intensive agriculture in watersheds has increased soil erosion and sediments in rivers. At the request of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), we evaluated the vertical accretion of sediment in the Mud Lake impoundment of Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), Brown...

Review of: Prairie Wetland Ecology: The Contribution of the Marsh Ecology Research Program by Henry R. Murkin, Arnold G. van der Valk, and William R. Clark, eds.

Review of: The Purple Martin. Robin Doughty and Rob Fergus. 2002. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. 93 pages. $19.95 (cloth).

There are many inconsistencies in early reports describing the relationships between plant abundance and other biotic (e.g., seed size) or abiotic variables (e.g., precipitation). It has been difficult to generalize such relationships when abundance is measured differently (e.g., density, biomass, cover). This article suggests using abundance in two broad categories: numerical abundance...

Three subspecies of sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) are recognized in the Midcontinental population, the lesser (Grus c. canadensis), Canadian (G. c. rowani), and greater (G. c. tabida). Blood samples collected on the population's primary spring staging area in Nebraska, U.S.A., were used to resolve the genetic relationship among these subspecies. Phylogenetic analysis of 27 G...

This paper aims at determining how different floristic elements (e.g. cosmopolitan, tropical, and temperate) change with latitude and major climate factors, and how latitude affects the floristic relationships between East Asia and the other parts of the world. The large-scale patterns of phytogeography in East Asia are strongly related to latitude, which covaries with several climatic...