Publications

Wild waterbirds, the natural reservoirs for avian influenza viruses, undergo migratory movements each year, connecting breeding and wintering grounds within broad corridors known as flyways. In a continental or global view, the study of virus movements within and across flyways is important to understanding virus diversity, evolution, and movement. From 2015 to 2017, we sampled waterfowl...

Large rivers are susceptible to anthropogenic alteration, which can result in drastic changes to their functional ecology. We evaluated spatial–temporal changes in the functional fish communities of the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) using data from six study reaches. Species were classified into one of 14 feeding guilds and mass per unit effort (MPUE) was then calculated for each...

The Milk and St. Mary Rivers are international waterways straddling the United States and Canada and traversing four Tribal Nations before draining into the Missouri and South Saskatchewan Rivers respectively. Management of water resources in the region is challenged by the complexity of stakeholder interests, the limitations of existing management infrastructure, and by a limited...

Movements by animals can serve different functions and occur over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Routine movement types, such as residency (localized movements) and migration, have been well studied. However, nonroutine movement types, such as dispersal, prospecting, and nomadism, are less well understood. Documenting these rarely detected events requires tracking large...

Grass carp, bighead carp, and silver carp spawn in flowing water. Their eggs, and then larvae, develop while drifting. Hydraulic conditions and water temperature control spawning locations, egg survival, and the downstream distance traveled before the hatched larvae can swim for low velocity nursery habitats. Existing egg drift models simulate the fluvial transport of carp eggs but have

Aim Biogeography seeks to identify and explain the spatial distributions of species and has become an important tool used by conservationists to protect and manage aquatic organisms. Texas, located in the southwestern United States, is home to 52 species of freshwater mussels, 9 of which are endemic to Texas and 7 that are endemic to Texas and neighboring states or countries. There have...

Sea-level rise (SLR) and obstructions to sediment delivery pose challenges to the persistence of estuarine habitats and the ecosystem services they provide. Restoration actions and sediment management strategies may help mitigate such challenges by encouraging the vertical accretion of sediment in and horizontal migration of tidal forests and marshes. We used a process-based soil...

Successful migration of Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) smolts seaward in the Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta (hereafter, Delta) requires navigating a network of numerous branching channels. Within the Delta, several key junctions route smolts either towards more direct paths to the ocean or towards the interior Delta, an area associated with decreased survival. Movements...

Climate change has caused shifts in seasonally recurring biological events leading to the temporal decoupling of consumer-resource pairs – i.e., phenological mismatching. Although mismatches often affect individual fitness, they do not invariably scale up to affect populations, making it difficult to assess the risk they pose. Individual variation may contribute to this inconsistency...

Conservation translocations, the human-mediated movement and release of a living organism for a conservation benefit, are increasingly recommended in species’ recovery plans as a technique for mitigating population declines or augmenting genetic diversity. However, translocation protocols for species with broad distributions may require regionally specific considerations to increase...

Rats (Rattus spp.) are likely established on 80–90% of the world’s islands and represent one of the most damaging and expensive biological invaders. Effective rat control tools exist but require accurate population density estimates or indices to inform treatment timing and effort and to assess treatment efficacy. Capture-mark-recapture data are frequently used to produce robust density...

No abstract available.