Publications

Hurricane Katrina pushed mixed Taxodium distichum forests toward a dominance of Taxodium distichum (baldcypress) and Nyssa aquatica (water tupelo) because these species had lower levels of susceptibility to wind damage than other woody species. This study documents the volume of dead versus live material of woody trees and shrubs of T. distichum swamps following Hurricane Katrina along...

Seed bank densities respond to factors across local to landscape scales, and therefore, knowledge of these responses may be necessary in forecasting the effects of climate change on the regeneration of species. This study relates the seed bank densities of species of Taxodium distichum swamps to local water regime and regional climate factors at five latitudes across the Mississippi...

Although hurricanes can damage or destroy coastal wetlands, they may play a beneficial role in reinvigorating marshes by delivering sediments that raise soil elevations and stimulate organic matter production. Hurricane Katrina altered elevation dynamics of two subsiding brackish marshes in the Mississippi River deltaic plain by adding 3 to 8 cm of sediment to the soil surface in August...

Distribution of marine submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV; i.e., seagrass) in the northern Gulf of Mexico coast has been documented, but there are nonmarine submersed or SAV species occurring in estuarine salinities that have not been extensively reported. We sampled 276 SAV beds along the gulf coast in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas in 2001 and 2002 in oligohaline to

Little is known about the effectiveness of mangroves in suppressing water level heights during landfall of tropical storms and hurricanes. Recent hurricane strikes along the Gulf Coast of the United States have impacted wetland integrity in some areas and hastened the need to understand how and to what degree coastal forested wetlands confer protection by reducing the height of peak...

Florida gar, Lepisosteus platyrhincus DeKay, were sampled in two canal systems in south Florida during 2000-2001 to estimate age, growth and mortality as part of the Everglades ecosystem-restoration effort. Tamiami (C-4) and L-31W canal systems had direct connections to natural wetlands of the Everglades and harboured large Florida gar populations. Of 476 fish aged, maximum ages were 19...

Early regeneration dynamics related to seed dispersal and seedling emergence can contribute to differences in species composition among a created and a natural salt marsh. The objectives of this study were to determine (1) whether aquatic and aerial seed dispersal differed in low and high elevations within a created marsh and a natural marsh and (2) whether seedling emergence was...

1. Trends of animal populations are of great interest in ecology but cannot be directly observed owing to imperfect detection. Binomial mixture models use replicated counts to estimate abundance, corrected for detection, in demographically closed populations. Here, we extend these models to open populations and illustrate them using sand lizard Lacerta agilis counts from the national...

A major bottleneck in the time required to publish a scientific or scholarly paper is the speed with which reviews by peers are returned to journals. Peer review is a reciprocal altruistic system in which each individual may perform every task—editors, reviewers, and authors—at different times. Journals have no way to coerce reviewers to return their critiques faster. To greatly shorten...

Interactions between two populations are often defined by their interaction outcomes; that is, the positive, neutral, or negative effects of species on one another. Yet, signs of outcomes are not absolute, but vary with the biotic and abiotic contexts of interactions. Here, we develop a general theory for transitions between outcomes based on consumer-resource (C-R) interactions in which...

No abstract available.

Sexing wild marine mammals that show little to no sexual dimorphism is challenging. For sirenians that are difficult to catch or approach closely, molecular sexing from tissue biopsies offers an alternative method to visual discrimination. This paper reports the results of a field study to validate the use of two sexing methods: (1) visual discrimination of sex vs (2) molecular sexing...