Publications

Temperature has a fundamental influence on physical, chemical and biological processing in aquatic ecosystems. River temperatures respond to a diverse array of drivers including air temperature, streamflow, and thermal inputs, but the physical template has been shown to play a significant role in structuring spatial and temporal variation in water temperature. How these factors interact...

Land-use intensification on arable land is expanding and posing a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide. We develop methods to link funding for avian breeding habitat conservation and management at landscape scales to equilibrium abundance of a migratory species at the continental scale. We apply this novel approach to a harvested bird valued by birders and hunters in...

The eastern migratory population of monarch butterflies has experienced a multi-decadal decline, but a recent increase in abundance (to 6.05 ha in winter 2018) has led some observers to question whether the population has reversed its long-standing decline and embarked on a trajectory of increasing abundance. We examined this possibility through changepoint analyses, first assessing...

Use of physically-motivated numerical models like groundwater flow-and-transport models for probabilistic impact assessments and optimization under uncertainty (OUU) typically incurs such a computational burdensome that these tools cannot be used during decision making. The computational challenges associated with these models can be addressed through emulation. In the land-use/water...

Transitional areas between ecosystem types are often active biogeochemically due to resource limitation changes. Lotic-to-lentic transitions in freshwaters appear active biogeochemically, but few studies have directly measured nutrient processing rates to assess whether processing within the rivermouth is important for load estimates or the local communities. We measured oxic fluxes of...

Large samples and long time series are often needed for effective broad-scale monitoring of status and trends in wild populations. Obtaining those sample sizes can be more feasible when volunteers contribute to the dataset, but volunteer-selected sites are not always representative of a population. Previous work to account for biased site selection has relied on knowledge of covariates...

The lampricides 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol (TFM) and niclosamide have been used for about 60 years to control sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) in the Great Lakes Basin and Lake Champlain. To register these chemicals as pesticides in North America, their environmental effects must be reviewed on a periodic basis. As a part of this effort, toxicity of TFM and niclosamide to duckweed...

Executive Summary The primary objective of the project was to locate previously unknown stands of mast-producing hardwood forest trees in the Upper Mississippi River floodplain using existing information. We located and mapped 399 previously unknown hardwood forest stands within the Mississippi River floodplain area of navigation pools 9, 10, and 11. Using color infrared images in...

Lampricide concentrations in whole larval sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) carcasses collected after lampricide treatments were determined to support risk assessment for non-target organisms that may consume lampricide-laden carcasses. Dead larvae were collected by Sea Lamprey Control personnel following the Ford River (Delta County, Michigan) 4.1 mg·L-1 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol...

Asian carp monitoring and contract removal will continue throughout the Upper Illinois Waterway system as needed for adaptive management to mitigate, control, and contain Asian carp. Compiling data from monitoring and removal efforts into a centralized database (Illinois River Catch Database application) facilitates data standardization, quality, accessibility, sharing, and analysis to...

This Monitoring and Response Plan provides the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee (ACRCC) with updates on FWS and USGS modeling efforts for the Spatially Explicit Asian carp Population (SEAcarP) model. For FY2020, efforts are underway to parameterize and analyze the SEAcarP model. Themes: invasive species; Asian carp; Great Lakes.

Off-channel and floodplain water bodies are important components of large river ecosystems while rare within the Middle Mississippi River. The lack of these habitats likely influences water quality, nutrient processing, and communities of organisms. In early 2016 a major flood event breached two levees south of Cape Girardeau, MO resulting in the creation of two new backwaters—Len Small...