Publications

General Electric Company (GE) directly and indirectly released polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River and the surrounding environment starting in the late 1940’s, making it one of the most PCB-contaminated rivers in North America. Source control at two GE plant sites was implemented in 2009 to stem the influx of PCBs into the river (NYSDEC 2004; Farrar 2013; NYSDEC 2015)...

The capture and use of water are critically important in drylands, which collectively constitute Earth's largest biome. Drylands will likely experience lower and more unreliable rainfall as climatic conditions change over the next century. Dryland soils support a rich community of microphytic organisms (biocrusts), which are critically important because they regulate the delivery and...

In high‐latitude lakes, air temperature is an important driver of ice cover thickness and duration, which in turn influence water temperature and primary production supporting lake consumers and predators. In lieu of multidecadal observational records necessary to assess the response of lakes to long‐term warming, we used otolith‐based growth records from a long‐lived resident lake fish...

Botswana’s Okavango Delta is a World Heritage Site and biodiverse wilderness. In 2016–2018, following arrival of the annual flood of rainwater from Angola’s highlands, and using continuous oxygen logging, we documented profound aquatic hypoxia that persisted for 3.5 to 5 months in the river channel. Within these periods, dissolved oxygen rarely exceeded 3 mg/L and dropped below 0.5 mg/L...

Studies of the effects of transmitters on wildlife often focus on survival. However, non-lethal behavioral changes resulting from radiomarking have the potential to affect inferences from telemetry data and may vary based on individual and environmental characteristics. We used a long-term, multi-species tracking study of sea ducks to assess behavioral patterns at multiple temporal...

Intraspecific variation in plant traits is a major cause of variation in herbivore feeding and performance. Plant defensive traits change as a plant grows, such that ontogeny may account for a substantial portion of intraspecific trait variation. We tested how the ontogenic stage of an individual plant, of an individual in the context of its neighboring plants, and of a patch of plants...

Managers are increasingly being asked to integrate climate change adaptation into public land management. The literature discusses a range of adaptation approaches, including managing for resistance, resilience, and transformation; but many strategies have not yet been widely tested. This study employed in-depth interviews and scenario-based focus groups in the Upper Gunnison Basin in...

Rivers commonly exhibit substantial variability in suspended‐sand concentration, even at constant water discharge. Here we derive an approach for evaluating how much of this variability arises from mean bed‐sand grain size. We apply this approach to the Colorado River in Grand Canyon, where discharge‐independent concentration of suspended sand varies by more than a factor of 23 (N = 1.4...

Differentiation in physiological activity is a critical component of resource partitioning in resource-limited environments. For example, it is crucial to understand how plant physiological performance varies through time for different functional groups to forecast how terrestrial ecosystems will respond to change. Here, we tracked the seasonal progress of 13 plant species representing...

Two tortoise species native to the American southwest have experienced significant habitat loss from development and are vulnerable to ongoing threats associated with continued development. Mojave desert tortoises Gopherus agassizii are listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act, and Sonoran desert tortoises G. morafkai are protected in Arizona (USA) and Mexico. Substantial...

What is the utility of vegetation measurements for wildlife managers? In the prairie, savanna, tundra, forest, steppe, and wetland regions of the world, mixtures of plant species provide wildlife with food, cover and, in some circumstances, water; the 3 essential habitat elements necessary to sustain viable wildlife populations. We define habitat in reference to use of a vegetation type...

No abstract available.