Publications

Coastal marshes are essential habitats for soil carbon accumulation and burial, which can influence the global carbon budget. Coastal Louisiana has extensive marsh habitats (fresh, intermediate, brackish, and saline) where soil cores were collected to a depth of 100 cm at 24 sites to assess long-term carbon accumulation and burial rates. Select soil depth intervals were analyzed for bulk...

Mangrove forests are likely vulnerable to accelerating sea-level rise; however, we lack the tools necessary to understand their future resilience. On the Pacific island of Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia, mangroves are habitat to endangered species and provide critical ecosystem services that support local communities. We developed a generalizable modeling framework for mangroves...

Tropicalization is a term used to describe the transformation of temperate ecosystems by poleward‐moving tropical organisms in response to warming temperatures. In North America, decreases in the frequency and intensity of extreme winter cold events are expected to allow the poleward range expansion of many cold‐sensitive tropical organisms, sometimes at the expense of temperate...

Order Acipenseriformes (sturgeons and paddlefishes) is an ancient lineage of osteichthyan fishes (>200 million years old) with most extant species at conservation risk. A relatively basal species, the pallid sturgeon, Scaphirhynchus albus, is a federally endangered species native to the Mississippi and Missouri River basins. Hybridization with sympatric shovelnose sturgeon, S...

During migration, birds must locate stopover habitats that provide sufficient resources to rest and refuel while en route to the breeding or non-breeding area. Long-distance migrants invariably encounter inhospitable geographic features, the edges of which are often characterized by habitat limited in food and safety. In response, they often depart in directions inconsistent with...

Topographic and hydrodynamic complexity in submarine canyons promotes steep gradients in food availability and geophysical parameters which affect ecological assemblages and beta diversity. While habitat heterogeneity in submarine canyons is known to support diverse and abundant megafaunal communities, due to difficulty in sampling little is known about infaunal communities adjacent to...

Herein we provide direct evidence for the consumption of Pomacea maculata (Giant Applesnail) eggs by ants in the genus Crematogaster. The observations were made during removal of snail egg masses at the Hudson Woods Unit of the Texas Mid-Coast National Wildlife Refuge, TX. We observed acrobat ants (Crematogaster sp.) removing snail eggs from an egg mass and carrying eggs back to their...

During migration, transient birds usually find themselves stopping in unfamiliar habitats in order to rest and refuel before resuming migratory flight. Here we document the first case, to our knowledge, of a Tennessee Warbler (Leiothlypis peregrina) entrapped in a spiderweb. The warbler's tarsus became caught in the mooring thread of a golden silk orb-weaver (Trichonephila clavipes) web...

Boreal peatland forests have relatively low species diversity and thus impacts of climate change on one or more dominant species could shift ecosystem function. Despite abundant soil water availability, shallowly rooted vascular plants within peatlands may not be able to meet foliar demand for water under drought or heat events that increase vapor pressure deficits while reducing near...

Mangroves are periodically influenced in negative ways by non-freezing temperatures across their global sub-tropical range. However, physiological and morphological evidence of chilling influences to non-freezing chilling events has not been measured in field settings. In this study, we measured sap flow (Js) during such a chilling (but non-freezing) event in southern China and...

The diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) is a small estuarine turtle distributed along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the USA that is threatened by drowning in crab pots, road mortality, exploitation in the pet trade, and habitat loss. Little is known about the movement patterns and home ranges of these turtles, particularly along the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast. Satellite tags were...

Asian swamp eel, Monopterus albus/javanensis [Zuiew, 1973/Lacepede 1800], has been established in the southeastern USA since at least 1994, yet little is known about its ability to survive low winter temperatures. We use standard thermal methodologies to quantify low temperature responses and provide a detailed description of swamp eel reactions to cold temperatures. When exposed to...