Publications

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Question How closely do plant communities track climate? Research suggests that plant species converge toward similar environmental tolerances relative to the environments that they experience. Whether these patterns apply to severe environments or scale up to plant community-level patterns of relative climatic tolerances is poorly understood. Using estimates of species' climatic...

Understanding how individual movement scales with body size is of fundamental importance in predicting ecological relationships for diverse species. One-dimensional movement metrics scale consistently with body size yet vary over different temporal scales. Knowing how temporal scale influences the relationship between animal body size and movement would better inform hypotheses about the

Drift-foraging models offer a mechanistic description of how fish feed in flowing water and the application of drift-foraging bioenergetics models to answer both applied and theoretical questions in aquatic ecology is growing. These models typically include nonlinear descriptions of ecological processes and as a result may be sensitive to how model inputs are summarized because of a...

Tamarisk is an invasive, riparian shrub species in the southwestern USA. The northern tamarisk beetle (Diorhabda carinulata) has been introduced to several states to control tamarisk. We classified tamarisk distribution in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona using a 0.2 m resolution, airborne multispectral data and estimated tamarisk beetle effects (overall accuracy of 86...

Climate change, particularly increased aridity, poses a significant threat to plants and the biotic communities they support. Dioecious species may be especially vulnerable to climate change given that they often exhibit spatial segregation of the sexes, reinforced by physiological and morphological specialization of each sex to different microhabitats. In dimorphic species, the...

Data on reproductive ecology of turtles in New Mexico are limited, and some species living there are among the least studied in the United States. We trapped 4 native species of turtles (Apalone spinifera, Chrysemys picta, Pseudemys gorzugi, and Trachemys gaigeae gaigeae) in the Rio Grande and Black River (Pecos River drainage) of New Mexico in June 2012 and 2013 to collect data on...

Current and future breeding ranges of 15 bird and 16 reptile species were modeled in the Southwestern United States. Rather than taking a broad-scale, vulnerability-assessment approach, we created a species distribution model (SDM) for each focal species incorporating climatic, landscape, and plant variables. Baseline climate (1940–2009) was characterized with Parameter-elevation...

Large areas of the desert southwest are currently developed or being evaluated for construction of utility-scale renewable energy projects. These projects include numerous solar and wind energy facilities some of which will be massive. Unfortunately, peer-reviewed scientific publications are not yet available to evaluate the potential effects of solar-based utility-scale renewable energy

Anthropogenic desertification is a problem that plagues drylands globally; however, the factors which maintain degraded states are often unclear. In Canyonlands National Park on the Colorado Plateau of southeastern Utah, many degraded grasslands have not recovered structure and function >40 yr after release from livestock grazing pressure, necessitating active restoration. We...

Despite being the driest inhabited continent, Australia has one of the highest per capita water consumptions in the world. In addition, instead of having fit-for-purpose water supplies (using different qualities of water for different applications), highly treated drinking water is used for nearly all of Australia’s urban water supply needs, including landscape irrigation. The water...

The federally threatened Agassiz’s desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) was listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1990, but thus far, recovery efforts have been unsuccessful (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [USFWS] 2015). Predation has been identified as a contributing factor to declining G. agassizii populations range-wide (e.g., Esque et al. 2010, Lovich et al. 2014)...