Publications

Context

Objective Monitoring and assessment of nongame native fishes is limited, but conservation interest in these species is growing. Freshwater Drum Aplodinotus grunniens are a wide-ranging species that serve important functional roles and could serve as an indicator for similar but less common species. Our overall objectives were to quantify and compare population dynamic rates and life...

A fundamental task in ecological statistics is to estimate abundance and growth rate distributions from wildlife monitoring data to inform conservation management. Modeling time series of wildlife populations presents a number of challenges from both statistical and ecological perspectives, including discreteness; lack of replication; nonstationarity; and observation, demographic, and...

1. Phytoplankton form the base of large river food webs but there are limited studies on the nature and drivers of communities over longer time scales. Further, climate change is projected to favor taxa associated with harmful algal blooms, but our knowledge of the timing, locations, and drivers of cyanobacteria in rivers lags that of lakes and marine environments. 2. We used a summer

The East River, an agricultural tributary to the Lower Fox River and Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, USA, has excessive phosphorus (P) and suspended-sediment loads that contribute to downstream eutrophication and habitat-related impairments. Spatial variations and connectivity in the sources and streambed storage of soft, fine-grained (silt and clay) sediment and related sediment-bound P...

Petromyzon marinus (sea lamprey) is a parasitic, invasive fish of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Since the late 1950s, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission has implemented an integrated Sea Lamprey Control Program (SLCP) that relies on two lampricidal chemicals: 3-(trifluoromethyl)-4-nitrophenol (TFM) and niclosamide. Niclosamide is applied using a bayluscide 20-percent emulsifiable...

Naegleria fowleri is a thermophilic free-living amoeba (FLA) and the causative agent of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, posing public health risks in warm freshwater environments. This multiyear, multiagency study surveyed 40 thermally impacted recreational waters across five western United States national parks and recreation areas–Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National...

Bats provide critical ecosystem services, but bat fatalities due to wind energy development may imperil some bat populations. Statistical models are used to estimate the total fatalities that occur based on carcasses observed during monitoring surveys. Current models often estimate fatalities aggregated across species, time, and/or turbines, but fall short of reliably informing siting...

Riverine dissolved silicon (DSi) dynamics reflect integrated geologic, hydrologic, climatic, and ecological controls. We compiled annual DSi data for 337 rivers across four continents and trained interpretable machine-learning models to predict concentrations and yields from 28 watershed variables. Both models reproduced testing data (R2 = 0.85 for concentration and 0.96 for yield) and...

Annual waterfowl harvest in North America is estimated through a collaborative and strategic process, with federal harvest surveys the primary method of estimation. Sea duck hunters participating in federal harvest surveys represent a small proportion of the overall waterfowl hunting population, limiting the utility of harvest estimates for sea ducks. The long-tailed duck (Clangula...

The hydrologic regime of the upper Mississippi River (UMR) has become wetter, with greater discharges, longer-lasting high-flow conditions, and seasonal shifts in these patterns over the past several decades. How these changes are expressed spatially as floodplain inundation area, frequency, depth, duration, and timing is not well understood. It is also unclear to what degree spatial...