Publications

Temperate savannas and grasslands are globally threatened. In the Midwest United States of America (USA), for example, oak savannas persist today at a small percentage of recent historic coverage. Therefore, restoration of habitats of low and intermediate canopy cover is a landscape conservation priority that often emphasizes returning tree density to a savanna-like target value...

Keys to Baird’s Sparrow (Centronyx bairdii) management are providing native or tame grasslands with moderately deep litter, controlling excessive grazing, and curtailing shrub encroachment. Baird’s Sparrows have been reported to use habitats with less than or equal to (≤) 101 centimeters (cm) average vegetation height, 3–46 cm visual obstruction reading (VOR), 15–71 percent grass cover...

Signs of disease, such as external lesions, have been prevalent in smallmouth bass throughout the Susquehanna River Basin, USA. Previous targeted chemical studies in this system have identified known persistent organic pollutants, but a common explanatory link across multiple affected sites remains undetermined. A fast and robust extraction method that can be applied to young-of-year...

Multiple restoration actions have been implemented in response to declining salmon populations. Among these is the addition of salmon carcasses or artificial nutrients to mimic marine-derived nutrients historically provided by large spawning runs of salmon. A key assumption in this approach is that increased nutrients will catalyze salmon population growth. Although effects on aquatic...

Hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the mangroves of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, in 2017. Basal area losses were large (63–100%) and storm losses of carbon associated with aboveground biomass amounted to 11.9–43.5 Mg C/ha. Carbon biomass of dead standing trees increased 8.1–18.3 Mg C/ha among sites, and carbon in coarse woody debris on the forest floor increased 1.9–18.2 Mg C/ha, with...

The resource concentration hypothesis predicts that herbivorous insect density scales positively with plant density because insects are better able to identify, and remain longer in, patches with denser plant resources. While some studies support this hypothesis, others do not. Different explanations have been proposed for this discrepancy, including variation in insect dispersal ability...

Between 19 – 30 May 2018, one of us [AW] discovered a disjunct population of Peninsula leaf-toed geckos, Phyllodactylus nocticolus (Phyllodactylidae) on the northern edge of the Coachella Valley in the Little San Bernardino Mountains of the Transverse Ranges (Fig. 1a). The previously northernmost location for the species is Tahquitz Canyon, Riverside Co. (MVZ 212205) in the Peninsular...

A key aspect in the use of fatty acids (FA) to estimate predator diets using Quantitative FA Signature Analysis (QFASA) is the ability to account for FA assimilation through the use of calibration coefficients (CC). Here, we tested the assumption that CC are independent of dietary fat concentrations by feeding Atlantic pollock (Pollachius virens) three formulated diets with very similar...

Regime shifts –persistent changes in the structure and function of an ecosystem - are well-documented in many ecosystems but remain poorly understood in floodplain-river ecosystems. We apply a resilience perspective to large floodplain-river ecosystems by presenting three examples of plausible sets of alternate regimes that are relevant to natural resource management interests within the...

Statistical inferences play a critical role in ecotoxicology. Historically, Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) has been the dominant method for inference in ecotoxicology. As a brief and informal definition of the NHST approach, researchers compare (or test) an experimental treatment or observation against a hypothesis of no relationship or effect (the null hypothesis) using the...

Environmental change associated with anthropogenic disturbance can lower habitat quality, especially for sensitive species such as many amphibians. Variation in environmental quality may affect an organism’s physiological health and, ultimately, survival and fitness. Using multiple health measures can aid in identifying populations at increased risk of declines. Our objective was to...

In the Northern Gulf of Mexico, salt marshes are threatened by sea level rise, erosion, and loss of protective barrier islands. These barrier islands provide critical habitat for wildlife, including globally significant populations of marsh and shorebirds. We investigated salt marsh restoration on two Louisiana barrier islands using presence of 8 marsh bird species as an index to...