Publications

The relative roles of top-down and bottom-up forces in affecting disease prevalence in wild hosts is important for understanding disease dynamics and human disease risk. We found that the prevalence of Sin Nombre virus (SNV), the agent of a severe disease in humans (hantavirus pulmonary syndrome), in island deer mice from the eight California Channel Islands was greater with increased

Documenting how different regions across a species' breeding and nonbreeding range are linked via migratory movements is the first step in understanding how events in one region can influence events in others and is critical to identifying conservation threats throughout a migratory animal's annual cycle. We combined two studies that evaluated migratory connectivity in the Willow...

Large areas of public land are currently being permitted or evaluated for utility-scale solar energy development (USSED) in the southwestern United States, including areas with high biodiversity and protected species. However, peer-reviewed studies of the effects of USSED on wildlife are lacking. The potential effects of the construction and the eventual decommissioning of solar energy...

Introductions of nonnative salmonids, such as rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss and brown trout Salmo trutta, have affected native fishes worldwide in unforeseen and undesirable ways. Predation and other interactions with nonnative rainbow trout and brown trout have been hypothesized as contributing to the decline of native fishes (including the endangered humpback chub Gila cypha) in...

We studied the long-term response of a cohort of eight female Agassiz’s desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) during the first 15 years following a large fire at a wind energy generation facility near Palm Springs, California, USA. The fire burned a significant portion of the study site in 1995. Tortoise activity areas were mapped using minimum convex polygons for a proximate post-fire...

Global temperature increases and precipitation changes are both expected to alter ecosystem carbon (C) cycling. We tested responses of ecosystem C cycling to simulated climate change using field manipulations of temperature and precipitation across a range of grass-dominated ecosystems along an elevation gradient in northern Arizona. In 2002, we transplanted intact plant–soil mesocosms...

The channel of the lower Rio Grande in the Big Bend region rapidly narrows during years of low mean and peak flow. We conducted stratigraphic, sedimentologic, and dendrogeomorphic analyses within two long floodplain trenches to precisely reconstruct the timing and processes of recent floodplain formation. We show that the channel of the Rio Grande narrowed through the oblique and...

Knowledge about the condition of vegetation cover and composition is critical for assessing the structure and function of ecosystems. To effectively quantify the impacts of a rapidly changing environment, methods to track long-term trends of vegetation must be precise, repeatable, and time- and cost-efficient. Measuring vegetation cover and composition in arid and semiarid regions is...

The future distribution of the Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia) is projected by combining a geostatistical analysis of 20th-century climates over its current range, future modeled climates, and paleoecological data showing its response to a past similar climate change. As climate rapidly warmed ;11 700 years ago, the range of Joshua tree contracted, leaving only the populations near what...

Long-term monitoring data are difficult to obtain for high-value resource areas, particularly in remote parts of national parks. One long-used method for evaluating change uses ground-based repeat photography to match historical images of landscapes. River expeditions that documented a proposed railroad route through Grand Canyon with large-format photographs occurred in 1889 and 1890. A...

The relatively few studies done on phosphorus (P) cycling in arid and semiarid lands (drylands) show many factors that distinguish P cycling in drylands from that in more mesic regions. In drylands, most biologically relevant P inputs and losses are from the deposition and loss of dust. Horizontal and vertical redistribution of P is an important process. P is concentrated at the soil...

Culverts are often used to increase the permeability of roaded landscapes for wildlife, including turtles. Although the benefits of culverts as safe passages for turtles are well documented, under some conditions culverts can entrap them and cause mortality. Here we report a culvert-related mortality in the federally threatened desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) at a wind energy...