Publications

Attempts to mitigate shoreline microbial contamination require a thorough understanding of pollutant sources, which often requires multiple years of data collection (e.g., point/nonpoint) and the interacting factors that influence water quality. Because restoration efforts can alter shoreline or beach morphology, revisiting source inputs is often necessary. Microbial source tracking (MST...

Understanding dreissenid mussel population dynamics and their impacts on lake ecosystems requires quantifying individual growth across a range of habitats. Most dreissenid mussel growth rates have been estimated in nutrient rich or nearshore environments, but mussels have continued to expand into deep, cold, low-nutrient habitats of the Great Lakes. We measured annual quagga mussel...

Wild reproduction by stocked lake trout Salvelinus namaycush in Lake Ontario has yet to produce a self-sustaining population, requiring a reliance on stocking. Once released, age-1 juvenile lake trout are not typically surveyed until age-2, creating a gap in knowledge of fine-scale post-release behaviors. A method to track fine-scale movements and estimate mortality of juvenile lake...

Saginaw Bay is a shallow, nutrient-rich embayment in Lake Huron that historically had a complex network of natural rocky reefs. These reef habitats were used as spawning and nursery areas for a variety of fish species, but decades of land-use related sedimentation caused many of these reefs to be degraded. Our study objectives were to analyze abiotic and biotic conditions on degraded and...

Secretive marsh birds (SMBs) are important indicator species of coastal wetlands but are difficult to detect and monitor. In coastal Louisiana, an important stronghold for these species, climate and hydrological models predict that freshwater and intermediate marshes will expand in the next 50 years, while brackish marshes will shrink. We used a multi-species Bayesian hierarchical...

The longnose darter Percina nasuta is a rare and cryptic fish that recently disappeared from much of its historic range. We developed and used an environmental DNA (eDNA) assay for longnose darter paired with visual surveys to better determine the species’ range and compare detection probability between sampling approaches in an occupancy modeling framework. We detected longnose darter...

Spring viremia of carp virus (SVCV), is a lethal freshwater pathogen of cyprinid fish, and Cyprinus carpio koi is a primary host species. The virus was initially described in the 1960s after outbreaks occurred in Europe, but a global expansion of SVCV has been ongoing since the late 1990s. Genetic typing of SVCV isolates separates them into 4 genotypes that are correlated with geographic...

The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is an invasive species in the Great Lakes and the focus of a large control and assessment program. Current assessment methods provide information on the census size of spawning adult sea lamprey in a small number of streams, but information characterizing reproductive success of spawning adults is rarely available. We used RAD-capture sequencing to...

No abstract available.

Mediterranean regions are biodiversity hotspots whose landscapes are characterized by evergreen sclerophyllous vegetation, mild-wet winters, and hot-dry summers. In the Northern Hemisphere, they occur in the Mediterranean Basin and California regions. In these areas, whose habitats are heavily shaped by centuries of anthropic activities, the main effects of climate change include a...

The estuarine habitat mosaic supports the reproduction, growth, and survival of resident and migratory fish species by providing a diverse portfolio of unique habitats with varying physical and biological features. Global climate change is expected to result in increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and changes in riverine hydrology, which will have profound effects on the extent...

Understanding the influence of population attributes on genetic diversity is important to advancement of biological conservation. Because bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) populations vary in size and management history, the species provides a unique opportunity to observe the response of average pairwise kinship, inversely related to genetic diversity, to a spectrum of natural and...