Publications

Poaching can have devastating impacts on animal and plant numbers, and in many countries has reached crisis levels, with illegal hunters employing increasingly sophisticated techniques. Here, we show how geographic profiling – a mathematical technique originally developed in criminology and recently applied to animal foraging and epidemiology – can be adapted for use in investigations of...

The severity of the effects of herbivory on plant fitness can be moderated by the ability of plants to compensate for biomass loss. Compensation is an important component of the ecological fitness in many plants, and has been shown to reduce the effects of pests on agricultural plant yields. It can also reduce the effectiveness of biocontrol through introduced herbivores in controlling...

In this article we describe eDNAoccupancy, an R package for fitting Bayesian, multi-scale occupancy models. These models are appropriate for occupancy surveys that include three, nested levels of sampling: primary sample units within a study area, secondary sample units collected from each primary unit, and replicates of each secondary sample unit. This design is commonly used in...

This chapter assesses the response of mangrove ecosystems to possible outcomes of climate change, with regard to the following categories: (i) distribution, diversity, and community composition, (ii) physiology of flora and fauna, (iii) water budget, (iv) productivity and remineralization, (v) carbon storage in biomass and sediments, and (vi) the filter function for elements beneficial...

Large Mississippi River (MR) diversions (peak water flow >1416 m3/s and sediment loads >165 kg/s) have been proposed as part of a suite of coastal restoration projects and are expected to rehabilitate and rebuild wetlands to alleviate the significant historic wetland loss in coastal Louisiana. These coastal wetlands are undergoing increasing eustatic sea‐level rise, land subsidence...

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill damaged thousands of km2 of intertidal marsh along shorelines that had been experiencing elevated rates of erosion for decades. Yet, the contribution of marsh oiling to landscape-scale degradation and subsequent land loss has been difficult to quantify. Here, we applied advanced remote sensing techniques to map changes in marsh land cover and...

Capture-recapture can be viewed as an animal survey method in which the count statistic is the total number of animals caught, and the associated detection probability is the probability of capture.

Established populations of introduced Pomacea maculata, a highly fecund, large species of apple snail native to South America, now occur throughout southeast Asia, in Spain and extensively across the southern United States. Substantial research on nonnative apple snails takes place in Southeast Asia and has frequently identified apple snails as P. canaliculata. That these Asian...

Future climate and land-use change may wreak havoc on wetlands, with the potential to erode their values as harbors for biota and providers of human services. Wetlands are important to protect, particularly because these provide a variety of ecosystem services including wildlife habitat, water purification, flood storage, and storm protection (Mitsch, Bernal, and Hernandez 2015). Without...

The Tampa Bay region of Florida (USA) is a hot spot for non-native freshwater fishes. However, published information on most non-native fishes in the basin is not current. Systematic sampling efforts targeting non-native fishes in the region were conducted from 2013–2015 by the University of Florida Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory. Data from these recent surveys were analyzed, along with...

Specimens of Oscar Astronotus ocellatus from a fish farm were abruptly submitted to salt stress of 14 ppt and 20 ppt, for 3 and 8 h to determine their plasma osmolality. Muscle wet body mass change in vitro was analyzed from control freshwater animals. Fish in 14 ppt presented no osmolality distress even after 8 h. In 20 ppt, a slight increase (10%) in plasma osmolality was observed for...

The Pleurobemini (Bivalvia: Unionida) represent approximately one-third of freshwater mussel diversity in North America. Species identification within this group is challenging due to morphological convergence and phenotypic plasticity. Accurate species identification, including characterisation of currently unrecognised taxa, is required to develop effective conservation strategies...