Publications

Managers of the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Projects (SWP) in California are confronted with difficult tradeoffs between water uses and associated values affected by water management decisions. These decisions involve altering the timing and magnitude of water releases from dams and reservoirs, which can affect habitats for economically important and Federally and State...

Integration of agroecosystems and other working landscapes with protected lands and waters is critical to the conservation of Earth's biodiversity. Rice agroecosystems support many species by providing aquatic habitat where natural wetlands have been altered or drained. In regions with long dry seasons, rice fields and associated irrigation canals provide essential habitat for wetland...

Background Understanding the relative contribution of climate and human factors to wildfires is critical for managing risk across California’s diverse ecosystems, in the United States (US).Aims We propose a model that distinguishes between proximate and ultimate drivers of fire regimes and apply it to a century of fire and climate data to assess regional variation in causal mechanisms...

Quantifying sea turtle nesting behavior is essential for recovery planning and evaluating management actions. Traditional monitoring approaches, based on nest counts from beach surveys, can misclassify non-nesting emergences, obscure true fecundity, and underestimate clutch frequency, metrics that directly influence population models and regulatory decisions. Here, we demonstrate that...

Understanding the distribution of grizzly bear populations in the lower-48 states, is important for their conservation and management, and for public safety. Previously, our research teams working in grizzly bear ecosystems in the lower-48 states used varying methods to estimate distribution of grizzly bear populations. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) and Northern Continental...

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America is a globally important area hosting >50 % of North America’s breeding ducks. Ducks in the PPR depend on wetlands and grasslands which have experienced accelerated losses in extent and quality due to agriculture. While other bird populations have declined, duck abundance reached record highs recently (2013–2017). We explored this...

Animal populations often experience acute natural disturbances, most of which are connected to short—term weather events. Occurrences of early—season tropical cyclones during the peak of the avian breeding season are likely to increase with climate change, which can substantially impact populations of coastal breeding birds at multiple scales. To understand the acute impacts of severe...

Introduction Seed-based restoration is widely implemented to recover degraded lands but often fails. Seed enhancement technologies may improve outcomes by shifting emergence to target favorable climate windows and serving as a bet-hedging strategy against increasingly variable precipitation patterns.Objectives To test the potential benefit of these technologies, we applied seed coatings...

Environments can shape the occurrence and extent of disease outbreaks in wildlife. We studied the effects of environmental features on the occurrence of treponeme-associated hoof disease (TAHD), an emerging infectious disease of free-ranging elk (Cervus canadensis), in southwestern Washington, USA. During the 2016–2022 harvest seasons, successful elk hunters returned mandatory harvest...

Addressing sustainability challenges requires an integrative approach that bridges scientific research with practical application. The field of cultural evolution (CE) offers a perspective that may guide transitions and cultural transformations for a sustainable future. However, there have been few efforts to apply this field to sustainability challenges. This study explores how CE can...

Culture, as the filter through which people view the world and a key determinant of human behaviour, is central to the practice of natural resource management and conservation. Conservation is intended to moderate the impacts of human cultural modification of the environment, exists as an endeavour because it is culturally valued, and acts largely through policies to encourage or...

Earth System Models (ESM) are crucial for quantifying climate impacts across Earth's interconnected systems and supporting science-based adaptation and mitigation. However, not including end-users, especially decision-makers representing communities vulnerable to climate change, can limit model utility, increase epistemic risks, and lead to information misuse in decision-making. While...