Publications

Nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) and major contributor to climate change, is primarily released through agricultural activities. To better understand and quantify how land management practices, local climate conditions, and soil physicochemical properties affect these agricultural N2O emissions, we conducted a review of the peer-reviewed literature on N2O emission from...

Surface coal mining and subsequent reclamation efforts in the Appalachian Mountains, USA, transform the ecological characteristics of natural landscapes. The Forestry Reclamation Approach (FRA) is a mine reclamation method that emphasizes best management practices in forestry. FRA practices have demonstrated success in establishing native forests and accelerating natural succession on...

Life history strategies vary widely among species and play a vital role in extinction risk, especially in a rapidly changing environment. For many taxa, information on life history such as longevity, lifespan, and generation time is incomplete. This is especially true for amphibians, which have experienced large-scale declines in recent decades. The mountain yellow-legged frog (Rana...

Questions remain about the distribution of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the environment, the sources and movement within and between ecosystems, and whether there are effects from such exposure. Information from the Upper Midwest and the mid-Atlantic regions of the United States, which have different PFAS sources, were investigated. Concentrations of Total40 (sum of 40...

The coastal Cactus Wren (Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus) persists in small and fragmented populations throughout southern California that are subject to genetic drift and inbreeding. We combined individual banding and resighting data and genotyped individuals at 22 microsatellite loci to assess whether heterozygosity was associated with survival across three regional Cactus Wren...

Oyster and seagrass are important sessile, habitat-forming species that may be impacted by changes in salinity regimes from anthropogenic or climatic drivers. While salinity tolerance literature is focused on controlled experiments, observed field salinity ranges of species are more disparate. The salinity ranges in which organisms are observed in the field may not align exactly with...

In this newsletter, we are excited to share our recent publication, Bridging theory and practice to inform seed selection for restoration, which is part of an ongoing collaborative effort with land managers and restoration practitioners to synthesize lessons learned and identify future research directions for native seed development and use in the U.S. We would also like to say thank you...

Ambient stream water temperatures affect salmonid movement and survival with fish actively seeking thermal refugia from warming waters. This study sought to investigate the potential role of water temperature in the perceived decline in native Brook Trout Salvelinus fontinalis and non-native Brown Trout Salmo trutta populations in the North Branch Au Sable River by fishers and reported...

Surface elevation data along the Texas Coast is limited, despite having some of the highest rates of relative sea-level rise in the country (Sweet et al., 2022). To narrow these knowledge and data gaps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) established the first landscape-scale rod surface elevation table (RSET) monitoring project aimed at examining surface elevation dynamics of...

This standard operating procedure (SOP) manual describes the collection of standardized, long-term data for aquatic vegetation communities in selected study pools of the Upper Mississippi River System in the United States. The primary intent of the data collection is to assess the status and trends that aid in understanding the unique river ecosystem and to guide large-scale ecological...

In 2020 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as part of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) Program, began a new project to characterize potential hydrogeomorphic change associated with hydrogeomorphic units (HGUs) and their catenae (units linked by their association with sediment sources and flow origins). The goal of the project was to develop a geographic information system...

Year-round records of thermal stratification in the Great Lakes are rare, and there are few observations of thermal stratification during winter. In this paper, we analyze temperature data from 13 temperature logger chains and from over 130 benthic acoustic receivers that were deployed across Lake Ontario for 2 yr. The timing and duration of the fall overturn correlate with the local...