Publications

Nematomorph parasites manipulate crickets to enter streams where the parasites reproduce. These manipulated crickets become a substantial food subsidy for stream fishes. We used a field experiment to investigate how this subsidy affects the stream community and ecosystem function. When crickets were available, predatory fish ate fewer benthic invertebrates. The resulting release of the...

Northern pintail Anas acuta (hereafter, pintail) populations have declined substantially throughout the western US since the 1970s, largely as a result of converting wetlands to cropland. Managed wetlands have been developed throughout the San Francisco Bay estuaries to provide wildlife habitat, particularly for waterfowl. Many of these areas were historically tidal baylands and plans...

Surging wildfires across the globe are contributing to escalating residential losses and have major social, economic, and ecological consequences. The highest losses in the U.S. occur in southern California, where nearly 1000 homes per year have been destroyed by wildfires since 2000. Wildfire risk reduction efforts focus primarily on fuel reduction and, to a lesser degree, on house

Revegetation of degraded arid lands often involves supplementing impoverished seed banks and improving the seedbed, yet these approaches frequently fail. To understand these failures, we tracked the fates of seeds for six shrub species that were broadcast across two contrasting surface disturbances common to the Mojave Desert—sites compacted by concentrated vehicle use and trenched sites...

Surf scoters Melanitta perspicillata are sea ducks that aggregate at spawning events of Pacific herring Clupea pallasi and forage on the eggs, which are deposited in abundance during spring at discrete sites. We evaluated whether migrating scoters followed a ‘silver wave’ of resource availability, analogous to the ‘green wave’ of high-quality foraging conditions that herbivorous...

Species formation during adaptive radiation often occurs in the context of a changing environment. The establishment and arrangement of populations, in space and time, sets up ecological and genetic processes that dictate the rate and pattern of differentiation. Here, we focus on how a dynamic habitat can affect genetic structure, and ultimately, differentiation among populations. We...

Knowledge of growth rates, age at maturity, and longevity are important aspects of a species life history and are directly applicable to life table creation and population viability analyses. We measured the growth of a cohort of 17 semi-wild Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) located in Rock Valley, Nevada over a 47-yr period beginning in 1963. The tortoises were initially marked as...

Parasite Niche Modeler (PaNic) is a free online software tool that suggests potential hosts for fish parasites. For a particular parasite species from the major helminth groups (Acanthocephala, Cestoda, Monogenea, Nematoda, Trematoda), PaNic takes data from known hosts (maximum body length, growth rate, life span, age at first maturity, trophic level, phylogeny, and biogeography) and...

Using forests to sequester carbon in response to anthropogenically induced climate change is being considered across the globe. A recent U.S. executive order mandated that all federal agencies account for sequestration and emissions of greenhouse gases, highlighting the importance of understanding how forest carbon stocks are influenced by wildfire. This paper reports the effects of the...

Avian influenza virus (AIV) is influenced by site fidelity and movements of bird hosts. We examined the movement ecology of American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) as potential hosts for West Nile virus (WNV) and greater white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons frontalis) as potential hosts for AIVs. Research was based on radio-telemetry studies conducted in the Central Valley of California...

Anthropogenic landscape change can lead to increased opportunities for pathogen transmission between domestic and non-domestic animals. Pumas, bobcats, and domestic cats are sympatric in many areas of North America and share many of the same pathogens, some of which are zoonotic. We analyzed bobcat, puma, and feral domestic cat samples collected from targeted geographic areas. We...

Urbanization can result in the fragmentation of once contiguous natural landscapes into a patchy habitat interspersed within a growing urban matrix. Animals living in fragmented landscapes often have reduced movement among habitat patches because of avoidance of intervening human development, which potentially leads to both reduced gene flow and pathogen transmission between patches...