Publications

A central challenge in applied ecology is understanding the effect of anthropogenic fatalities on wildlife populations and predicting which populations may be particularly vulnerable and in greatest need of management attention. We used 3 approaches to investigate potential effects of fatalities from collisions with wind turbines on 14 raptor species for both current (106 GW) and...

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) Quarterly Mortality Report provides brief summaries of epizootic mortality and morbidity events by quarter. The write-ups, highlighting epizootic events and other wildlife disease topics of interest, are published in the Wildlife Disease Association quarterly newsletter. A link is provided in this WDA newsletter to the Wildlife Health...

Climate change and the extreme weather associated with it can be a major challenge to natural resource managers charged with the protection, restoration, recovery, and management of wetlands and wildlife habitats. Forecasting the potential impacts of climate changes will be important for decision-makers and land managers seeking to minimize impacts to habitats, infrastructure, and...

The Midcontinent Rift System (MRS) is expressed geophysically by a semi-linear, regional gravity high that trends across the Midcontinent and Great Lakes region of North America. The gravity high is interrupted by two prominent, semi-circular gravity lows, which have been interpreted from modeling and seismic-reflection sections as basement highs of Archean granite (Allen et al., 1997)...

A solid lampricide formulation containing 23% 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol (TFM) as the active ingredient was developed in the mid-1980s for use in small tributaries of dendritic streams during routine treatments to kill larval sea lamprey. This TFM bar formulation was designed to use a matrix of commercially prepared surfactants that would dissolve and slowly release their TFM...

Alaska provides habitat for 143 species of landbirds that occur regularly in the state, about half of which breed predominantly north of the border between the contiguous United States and Canada. The road-based North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) provides some data on population trends in Alaska, but most northern populations are inadequately monitored by this program because of a...

No abstract available.

Urbanization is a major contributor to habitat loss and fragmentation and is considered a global threat to biodiversity. We studied reptile and amphibian species diversity and abundance in a highly fragmented landscape adjacent to the second largest metropolitan area in the United States. Habitat patches in our study area were made up of remnant native vegetation surrounded by roads...

Smallmouth bass Micropterus dolomieu is an economically important sportfish and within the Chesapeake Bay watershed has experienced a high prevalence of external lesions, infectious disease, mortality events, reproductive endocrine disruption and population declines. To date, no clear or consistent associations with contaminants measured in fish tissue or surface water have been found...

Many seed mix recommendations for creating pollinator habitat are in part based on anecdotal evidence or field observations of bees visiting forbs (i.e. use). However, there is limited information on what forbs are preferred by bees, particularly in working landscapes where bee forage may be limited. We examined floral resource selection by wild bees and honey bees on grasslands in the...

Temperature is a critical driver of ectotherm life-history strategies, whereby a warmer environment is associated with increased growth, reduced longevity and accelerated senescence. Increasing evidence indicates that thermal adaptation may underlie such life-history shifts in wild populations. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and copy number variants (CNVs) can help uncover the...

Decreased availability of forage, as well as increased pesticide exposure, are important factors in the decline of honey bee health. Here, we isolate land cover transitions and their effect on honey production at 160 commercial apiaries in the Northern Great Plains. We found that land cover changes from 2008 to 2012 caused an annual decline in honey yields of 0.9% in the study area...