Southwest Biological Science Center
Publications
Half of global methane emissions come from highly variable aquatic ecosystem sources
Atmospheric methane is a potent greenhouse gas that plays a major role in controlling the Earth’s climate. The causes of the renewed increase of methane concentration since 2007 are uncertain given the multiple sources and complex biogeochemistry. Here, we present a metadata analysis of methane fluxes from all major natural, impacted and human-...
Rosentreter, Judith A.; Borges, Alberto V.; Deemer, Bridget; Holgerson, Meredith A.; Liu, Shaoda; Song, Chunlin; Melack, John M.; Raymond, Peter A.; Duarte, Carlos M.; Allen, George H.; Olefeldt, David; Poulter, Benjamin; Batin, Tom I.; Eyre, Bradley D.
The Transformation of dryland rivers: The future of introduced tamarisk in the U.S.
Tamarix spp. (tamarisk or saltcedar), a shrub-like tree, was intentionally introduced to the U.S. from Asia in the mid-1800s. Tamarisk thrives in today’s human-altered streamside (riparian) habitats and can be found along wetlands, rivers, lakes, and streams across the western U.S. In 2001, a biological control agent, Diorhabda spp. (tamarisk leaf...
Nagler, Pamela L.; Hull, Julia B.; van Riper, Charles; Shafroth, Patrick B.; Yackulic, Charles B. Gopherus Agassizii (Agassiz’s Desert Tortoise). Overwinter movement
No abstract available.
Cummings, Kristy L.; Lovich, Jeffrey E.; Puffer, Shellie R. Drivers of methane flux differ between lakes and reservoirs, complicating global upscaling efforts
Methane is an important greenhouse gas with growing atmospheric concentrations. Freshwater lakes and reservoirs contribute substantially to atmospheric methane concentrations, but the magnitude of this contribution is poorly constrained. Uncertainty stems partially from whether the sites currently sampled represent the global population as well as...
Deemer, Bridget; Holgerson, Meredith A. A roadmap for sampling and scaling biological nitrogen fixation in terrestrial ecosystems
Accurately quantifying rates and patterns of biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) in terrestrial ecosystems is essential to characterize ecological and biogeochemical interactions, identify mechanistic controls, improve BNF representation in conceptual and numerical modelling, and forecast nitrogen limitation constraints on future carbon (C) cycling...
Soper, Fiona M.; Taylor, Benton; Winbourne, Joy; Wong, Michelle; Dynarski, Katherine A; Reis, Carla R. G.; Peoples, Mark; Cleveland, Cory; Reed, Sasha; Menge, Duncan; Perakis, Steven ‘Unscrambling’ the drivers of egg production in Agassiz’s desert tortoise: Climate and individual attributes predict reproductive output
ABSTRACT: The ‘bet hedging’ life history strategy of long-lived iteroparous species reduces short-term reproductive output to minimize the risk of reproductive failure over a lifetime. For desert-dwelling ectotherms living in variable and unpredictable environments, reproductive output is further influenced by precipitation and temperature via...
Mitchell, Corey I.; Friend, Derek A.; Phillips, Lauren T.; Hunter, Elizabeth A.; Lovich, Jeffrey E.; Agha, Mickey; Puffer, Shellie R.; Cummings, Kristy L.; Medica, Philip A.; Esque, Todd C.; Nussear, Kenneth E.; Shoemaker, Kevin T. UAV-based estimate of snow cover dynamics: Optimizing semi-arid forest structure for snow persistence
Seasonal snow cover in the dry forests of the American West provides essential water resources to both human and natural systems. The structure of trees and their arrangement across the landscape are important drivers of snow cover distribution across these forests, varying widely in both space and time. We used unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)...
Belmonte, Adam; Sankey, Temuulen T.; Biedermann, Joel; Bradford, John; Goetz, Scott J; Kolb, Thomas Monitoring Tamarix changes using WorldView-2 satellite imagery in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
Remote sensing methods are commonly used to monitor the invasive riparian shrub tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) and its response to the northern tamarisk beetle (D. carinulata), a specialized herbivore introduced as a biocontrol agent to control tamarisk in the Southwest USA in 2001. We use a Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) supervised classification method...
Bransky, Nathaniel D.; Sankey, Temuulen T.; Sankey, Joel B.; Johnson, Matthew D.; Jamison, Levi R. Response to ‘Stochastic and deterministic interpretation of pool models’
We concur with Azizi‐Rad et al. (2021) that it is vital to critically evaluate and compare different soil carbon models, and we welcome the opportunity to further describe the unique contribution of the PROMISE model (Waring et al. 2020) to this literature. The PROMISE framework does share many features with established biogeochemical models, as...
Waring, Bonnie G.; Sulman, Benjamin N.; Reed, Sasha; Smith, A. Peyton; Averill, Colin; Creamer, Courtney; Cusack, Daniela F.; Hall, Steven J.; Jastrow, Julie D.; Jilling, Andrea; Kemner, Kenneth M.; Kleber, Markus; Allen Liu, Xiao-Jun; Pett-Ridge, Jennifer; Schulz, Marjorie S. Greenhouse gas emissions from an arid-zone reservoir and their environmental policy significance: Results from existing global models and an exploratory dataset
Reservoirs in arid regions often provide critical water storage but little is known about their greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint. While there is growing appreciation of the role reservoirs play as GHG sources, there is a lack of understanding of GHG emission dynamics from reservoirs in arid regions and implications for environmental policy. Here we...
Waldo, Sarah; Deemer, Bridget; Bair, Lucas S.; Beaulieu, Jake J. Lampropeltis californiae (California kingsnake) behavior, male-male combat
There are few published descriptions of male-male combat in Lampropeltis spp. under natural conditions. Shaw (1951. Herpetologica 7:149-168) briefly described aggressive interactions between two captive male L. annulata (Mexican Milksnakes) that appeared to be associated with feeding, and Moehn (1967. Copeia 1967:480–481) described the "combat...
Starr, S.; Drost, Charles A.; Holycross, A.T. Partial migration and spawning movements of humpback chub in the Little Colorado River are better understood using data from autonomous PIT tag antennas
Choosing whether or not to migrate is an important life history decision for many fishes. Here we combine data from physical captures and detections on autonomous passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag antennas to study migration in an endangered fish, the humpback chub (Gila cypha). We develop hidden Markov mark-recapture models with and...
Dzul, Maria C.; Kendall, William Louis; Yackulic, Charles; Winkelman, Dana L.; Van Haverbeke, David Randall; Yard, Mike