Publications

1. Many public lands, including those managed by the U.S. National Park Service(NPS), have the purpose of conserving natural and cultural resources and providing opportunities for visitors to recreate in and enjoy these areas. Achieving this mission becomes more challenging as drought, flooding, increasing temperatures and other climatic change effects are impacting NPS lands and...

Sustainable and just environmental management depends on meaningful consideration of the plural values of nature, as they arise in association with diverse worldviews and understandings of well-being. To achieve value pluralism in decision-making, we must also attend to knowledge pluralism, in terms of recognizing the validity and decision relevance of a broader suite of knowledge forms...

Invasive sea lamprey inhabiting the North American Laurentian Great Lakes are the target of the world’s longest running vertebrate invasive species control program. However, metapopulation dynamics comprising survival and dispersal during the sea lampreys’ lake-resident life stages are poorly understood. We applied acoustic telemetry and continuous-time multistate capture-recapture...

The Palila (Loxioides bailleui), the last member of the once speciose finch-billed Hawaiian honeycreeper clade (Drepanidinae) in the main Hawaiian Islands, faces critical conservation challenges as an endangered species. Understanding the drivers of its decline is essential for effective management. We used additive decomposition models to examine temporal trends in climatic variables...

Ecohydrology emphasizes the interactions between ecological and hydrological patterns and processes in wetlands. Given that wetlands are fundamentally defined by prolonged saturation or flooding of land, an ecohydrological perspective is implicit in wetland ecology. In this review, we provide examples of how variation in hydrologic processes in space and time influences wetland...

Wetlands are a major source of methane emissions and contribute to the observed increase in atmospheric methane over the last 20 years. Methane production in wetlands is the final step of carbon decomposition performed by anaerobic archaea. Although hydrogen/carbon dioxide and acetate are the substrates most often attributed to methanogenesis, other substrates—such as methylated...

The development of environmental DNA (eDNA) methods for terrestrial arthropods could be transformative for the difficult task of assessing the status of species of conservation concern. The primary goal of this study was to investigate the efficacy of detecting the Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae) from its DNA left behind on inflorescences as a means of inferring species presence. We...

Subspecies are often targets for conservation, yet many lack the genetic data necessary to validate their status as distinctive evolutionary lineages. In 2016, conservationists faced this issue when designating the California glossy snake, Arizona elegans occidentalis, as a Species of Special Concern in California, a decision prompted by population declines and habitat loss but absent of...

Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) control in the Laurentian Great Lakes of North America is among the largest and most successful control programs of an invasive species anywhere on the planet. The effort began more than 75 years ago; it unites multiple nations, states, and provinces with the common goal of controlling this invasive species and protecting a valuable fishery. The science...

Since its discovery in 2006, the fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome (WNS) has killed millions of bats. Of the 47 bat species native to the conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada, 12 have been affected by WNS, including 3 endangered species and 1 proposed endangered species. WNS has also been detected in 40 States and 9 Canadian Provinces. U.S. Geological Survey...

No abstract available.

Fire is a defining feature of our biosphere, having appeared when the first plants colonized the land, and it continues to occur across the planet at different frequencies and intensities. Fire has been and remains as an evolutionary force in many plant and animal lineages and contributes to explaining the variability of our biodiversity. Fire has also shaped the structure of many...