Publications

Low-amplitude “whisper songs” are a taxonomically broad phenomenon in birds that could play an important role in the suite of behaviors birds use to communicate. Due to its cryptic nature, there are inherent difficulties in capturing high-quality whisper song recordings without interrupting natural behaviors. Thus, the whisper song acoustic structure is poorly understood and its...

Fall bottom trawl (fall BT) and lakewide acoustic (AC) surveys are conducted annually to generate indices of pelagic and benthic prey fish densities in Lake Michigan. The fall BT survey has been conducted each fall since 1973 using 12-m trawls at depths ranging from 9 to 110 m at fixed locations distributed across seven transects; this survey estimates densities of seven prey fish...

No abstract available.

Anthropogenic infrastructure has contributed to increasing common raven (Corvus corax) abundance across the Great Basin region of the United States, particularly in sagebrush ecosystems, where high raven densities are correlated with reduced sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) nest survival. Our understanding of how raven reproductive behavior affects sage-grouse nest predation is...

The pallid sturgeon Scaphirhynchus albus is a long-lived, endangered fish in the Missouri River. Individuals become piscivorous as adults, so recruitment from stocking or reproduction could reduce populations of prey, including Macrhybopsis chubs. We constructed an individual- and age-based, multi-species, predator-prey-competitor model (IAMP) to represent the benthic community...

Anthropogenic influences like land use and climate variability interact with natural heterogeneity to influence the persistence of stream salamanders. Using occupancy modeling in the southern Appalachian Mountains, we investigated the influence of land use, climate, and physical context (e.g., drainage area, elevation) on stream salamander occupancy, noting species, and life stage...

Freshwater amphipods play a key role as forage for breeding and migrating waterfowl in wetlands throughout the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America. Amphipod populations declined in recent decades, but there is a limited understanding of mechanisms for their decline and their uneven distribution across the landscape. Row crop agriculture is abundant in the PPR, but the...

Project Overview: The Klamath Tribes (TKT) are the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin Paiute peoples, and are the first peoples of the land, having lived in ancestral lands of Oregon and California since time immemorial. Members of TKT have rights to hunt, fish, trap, and gather, including the harvest of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni) within the 1.19...

Evaluating progress toward achieving freshwater conservation and sustainability goals requires transforming diverse types of data into useful information for scientists, managers, and other interest groups. Despite substantial increases in the volume of freshwater data collected worldwide, many regions and ecosystems still lack sufficient data collection and/or data access. We illustrate...

Plant communities on mountain summits are commonly long-lived, cold-adapted perennials with low dispersal ability. These characteristics in tandem with limited area to track suitable conditions make these mountain communities potentially highly vulnerable to climate change, and indicators of climate change impacts. We investigated temporal changes in plant communities on 29 arid mountain...

Critical minerals are commodities essential to modern industrial and strategic technologies and are highly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. The Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (CMMI) is a collaboration among the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Geological Survey of Canada, and Geoscience Australia that aims to deepen global understanding of where critical minerals are...

Habitat features needed by wildlife can change in composition throughout the year, particularly in temperate ecosystems, leading to distinct seasonal spatial-use patterns. Studies of species-habitat associations therefore often focus on understanding relationships within discrete seasonal periods with common goals of prediction (e.g., habitat mapping) and inference (e.g., interpreting...