Publications

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill damaged thousands of km2 of intertidal marsh along shorelines that had been experiencing elevated rates of erosion for decades. Yet, the contribution of marsh oiling to landscape-scale degradation and subsequent land loss has been difficult to quantify. Here, we applied advanced remote sensing techniques to map changes in marsh land cover and...

Capture-recapture can be viewed as an animal survey method in which the count statistic is the total number of animals caught, and the associated detection probability is the probability of capture.

Established populations of introduced Pomacea maculata, a highly fecund, large species of apple snail native to South America, now occur throughout southeast Asia, in Spain and extensively across the southern United States. Substantial research on nonnative apple snails takes place in Southeast Asia and has frequently identified apple snails as P. canaliculata. That these Asian...

The Tampa Bay region of Florida (USA) is a hot spot for non-native freshwater fishes. However, published information on most non-native fishes in the basin is not current. Systematic sampling efforts targeting non-native fishes in the region were conducted from 2013–2015 by the University of Florida Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory. Data from these recent surveys were analyzed, along with...

Future climate and land-use change may wreak havoc on wetlands, with the potential to erode their values as harbors for biota and providers of human services. Wetlands are important to protect, particularly because these provide a variety of ecosystem services including wildlife habitat, water purification, flood storage, and storm protection (Mitsch, Bernal, and Hernandez 2015). Without...

Specimens of Oscar Astronotus ocellatus from a fish farm were abruptly submitted to salt stress of 14 ppt and 20 ppt, for 3 and 8 h to determine their plasma osmolality. Muscle wet body mass change in vitro was analyzed from control freshwater animals. Fish in 14 ppt presented no osmolality distress even after 8 h. In 20 ppt, a slight increase (10%) in plasma osmolality was observed for...

The Pleurobemini (Bivalvia: Unionida) represent approximately one-third of freshwater mussel diversity in North America. Species identification within this group is challenging due to morphological convergence and phenotypic plasticity. Accurate species identification, including characterisation of currently unrecognised taxa, is required to develop effective conservation strategies...

The development and use of automated species-detection technologies, such as acoustic recorders, for monitoring wildlife are rapidly expanding. Automated classification algorithms provide a cost- and time-effective means to process information-rich data, but often at the cost of additional detection errors. Appropriate methods are necessary to analyse such data while dealing with the...

We present a revised list of freshwater mussels (order Unionida, families Margaritiferidae and Unionidae) of the United States and Canada, incorporating changes in nomenclature and systematic taxonomy since publication of the most recent checklist in 1998. We recognize a total of 298 species in 55 genera in the families Margaritiferidae (one genus, five species) and Unionidae (54 genera...

Synonymies, diagnoses, descriptions, illustrations, an identification key, and meristic frequency tables are provided for all species of Lonchopisthus. Most of the skeletal anatomy of L. higmani is also illustrated. A new jawfish, Lonchopisthus ancistrus n. sp., is described from the Gulf of Mexico and off Honduras based on 21 specimens 41–89 mm SL. The new species differs from other...

During spring 2015, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission (NGPC) biologists noted that pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) were in poor condition during sampling associated with the Pallid Sturgeon Population Assessment Project and NGPC’s annual pallid sturgeon broodstock collection effort. These observations prompted concerns that reduced fish condition could compromise reproductive...

Climate greatly influences the structure and functioning of tidal saline wetland ecosystems. However, there is a need to better quantify the effects of climatic drivers on ecosystem properties, particularly near climate-sensitive ecological transition zones. Here, we used climate- and literature-derived ecological data from tidal saline wetlands to test hypotheses regarding the influence...