Publications
Below are publications associated with the Southwest Biological Science Center's research.
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Filter Total Items: 1538
Global conservation status of turtles and tortoises (order Testudines) Global conservation status of turtles and tortoises (order Testudines)
We present a review and analysis of the conservation status and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) threat categories of all 360 currently recognized species of extant and recently extinct turtles and tortoises (Order Testudines). Our analysis is based on the 2018 IUCN Red List status of 251 listed species, augmented by provisional Red List assessments by the IUCN...
Authors
Anders G.J. Rhodin, Craig B. Stanford, Peter Paul van Dijk, Carla Eisemberg, Luca Luiselli, Russell A. Mittermeier, Rick Hudson, Brian D. Horne, Eric Goode, Gerald Kuchling, Andrew Walde, Ernst H. W. Baard, Kristin H. Berry, Albert Bertolero, Torsten E. G. Blanck, Roger Bour, Kurt A. Buhlmann, Linda J. Cayot, Sydney Collett, Andrea Currylow, Indraneil Das, Tomas Diagne, Joshua R. Ennen, German Forero-Medina, Matthew G. Frankel, Uwe Fritz, Gerardo Garcia, J. Whitfield Gibbons, Paul M. Gibbons, Gong Shiping, Joko Guntoro, Margaretha D. Hofmeyr, John B. Iverson, A. Ross Kiester, Michael Lau, Dwight P. Lawson, Jeffrey E. Lovich, Edward O. Moll, Vivian P. Paez, Rosalinda Palomo-Ramos, Kalyar Platt, Steven G. Platt, Peter C. H. Pritchard, Hugh R. Quinn, Shahriar Caesar Rahman, Soary Tahafe Randrianjafizanaka, Jason Schaffer, Will Selman, H. Bradley Shaffer, Dionysius S. K. Sharma, Shi Haitao, Shailendra Singh, Ricky Spencer, Kahleana Stannard, Sarah Sutcliffe, Scott Thomson, Richard C. Vogt
Life history with emphasis on geographic variation Life history with emphasis on geographic variation
Every organism is defined by a set of vital rates that evolve to enhance lifetime reproductive fitness and survival of individuals and their progeny. These traits vary due to the complex but sometimes predictable interactions between individuals, populations and their environments. Collectively, these attributes are referred to as life history traits and include age and size of maturity...
Authors
Jeffrey E. Lovich, J. Whitfield Gibbons, Kathryn Greene
Quantifying postfire aeolian sediment transport using rare earth element tracers Quantifying postfire aeolian sediment transport using rare earth element tracers
Grasslands, which provide fundamental ecosystem services in many arid and semiarid regions of the world, are undergoing rapid increases in fire activity and are highly susceptible to postfire-accelerated soil erosion by wind. A quantitative assessment of physical processes that integrates fire-wind erosion feedbacks is therefore needed relative to vegetation change, soil biogeochemical...
Authors
David Dukes, Howell B. Gonzales, Sujith Ravi, David E. Grandstaff, R. Scott Van Pelt, Junran Li, Guan Wang, Joel B. Sankey
Taxonomy: A history of controversy and uncertainty Taxonomy: A history of controversy and uncertainty
No abstract available.
Authors
Jeffrey E. Lovich, Kristen Hart
Agriculture Agriculture
Agricultural production is a fundamental activity conducted on 45% of the U.S. land area, 55% of Mexico’s land area, and 7% of Canada’s land area (World Bank 2016). Because of this vast spatial extent and the strong role that land management plays in how agricultural ecosystems function, agricultural lands and activities represent a large portion of the North American carbon budget...
Authors
Alexander N. Hristov, Jane M. F. Johnson, Charles W. Rice, Molly E. Brown, Richard T. Conant, Stephen J. Del Grosso, Noel P. Gurwick, C. Alan Rotz, Upendra M. Sainju, R. Howard Skinner, Tristram O. West, Benjamin R. K. Runkle, Henry Janzen, Sasha C. Reed, Nancy Cavallaro, Gyami Shrestha
Population expansion of Humpback chub in western Grand Canyon and hypothesized mechanisms Population expansion of Humpback chub in western Grand Canyon and hypothesized mechanisms
Humpback chub, Gila cypha, is an endangered warm water fish endemic to the Colorado River basin of southwestern North America. In Grand Canyon National Park, cold hypolimnetic water-release temperatures from Glen Canyon Dam have largely precluded successful spawning and recruitment of humpback chub in the mainstem Colorado River. Therefore, the species has utilized the warmer, more...
Authors
David R. VanHaverbeke, Dennis M. Stone, Michael J. Dodrill, Kirk L. Young, Michael J. Pillow
Case studies of capacity building for biodiversity monitoring Case studies of capacity building for biodiversity monitoring
Monitoring the status and trends of species is critical to their conservation and management. However, the current state of biodiversity monitoring is insufficient to detect such for most species and habitats, other than in a few localised areas. One of the biggest obstacles to adequate monitoring is the lack of local capacity to carry out such programs. Thus, building the capacity to do...
Authors
Dirk S. Schmeller, Christos Arvanitidis, Monika Bohm, Neil Brummitt, Eva Chatzinikolaou, Mark John Costello, Hui Ding, Michael J. Gill, Peter Haase, Romain Juillard, Jaime Garcia-Moreno, Nathalie Pettorelli, Cui Peng, Corinna Riginos, Ute Schmiedel, John P. Simaika, Carly Waterman, Jun Wu, Haigen Xu, Jayne Belnap
Population trends, extinction risk, and conservation guidelines for ferruginous pygmy-owls in the Sonoran Desert Population trends, extinction risk, and conservation guidelines for ferruginous pygmy-owls in the Sonoran Desert
Climatic flux together with anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover pose major threats to wildlife, but our understanding of their combined impacts is limited. In arid southwestern North America, ferruginous pygmy-owls (Glaucidium brasilianum) are of major conservation concern due to marked declines in abundance linked to changes in land use and land cover during the past...
Authors
Aaron Flesch, Pamela L. Nagler, Christopher Jarchow, Richard B. Alexander
Turtles: Freshwater Turtles: Freshwater
With their iconic shells, turtles are morphologically distinct in being the only extant or extinct vertebrate animals to have their shoulders and hips inside their rib cages. By the time an asteroid hit the earth 65.5 million years ago, causing the extinction of dinosaurs, turtles were already an ancient lineage that was 70% through their evolutionary history to date. The remarkable...
Authors
J. Whitfield Gibbons, Jeffrey E. Lovich, R.M. Bowden
Sand pulses and sand patches on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon Sand pulses and sand patches on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon
Alluvial sandbars occur in lateral recirculation zones (eddies) along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon National Park (Schmidt, 1990). Resource managers periodically release controlled floods from the upstream Glen Canyon Dam to rebuild these bars (Grams et al., 2015), which erode during fluctuating dam releases, and by hillslope runoff and wind deflation (Hazel et al., 2010). Because...
Authors
Paul E. Grams, Daniel D. Buscombe, David J. Topping, Erich R. Mueller
Reviews and syntheses: Field data to benchmark the carbon cycle models for tropical forests Reviews and syntheses: Field data to benchmark the carbon cycle models for tropical forests
For more accurate projections of both the global carbon (C) cycle and the changing climate, a critical current need is to improve the representation of tropical forests in Earth system models. Tropical forests exchange more C, energy, and water with the atmosphere than any other class of land ecosystems. Further, tropical-forest C cycling is likely responding to the rapid global warming
Authors
Deborah A. Clark, Shinichi Asao, Rosie A. Fisher, Sasha C. Reed, Peter B. Reich, Michael G. Ryan, Tana E. Wood, Xiaojuan Yang
The sand dunes of the Colorado River, Grand Canyon, USA The sand dunes of the Colorado River, Grand Canyon, USA
The flow (Wright and Kaplinski, 2011), suspended sediment transport (Topping et al., 2000), sediment storage (Grams et al., 2013), and sedimentology of sandbars (Rubin et al., 1998) of the 250 miles of the Colorado River that run through Grand Canyon National Park have been well studied and described. However, there has been little systematic or synoptic description of the morphologies...
Authors
Daniel D. Buscombe, Matthew Kaplinski, Paul E. Grams, Thomas Ashley, Brandon McElroy, David M. Rubin