Publications

Wildfires destabilize biocrust, requiring decades for most biological constituents to regenerate, but bacteria may recover quickly and mitigate the detrimental consequences of burnt soils. To evaluate the short-term recovery of biocrust bacteria, we tracked shifts in bacterial community form and function in Cyanobacteria/lichen-dominated (shrub interspaces) and Cyanobacteria/moss...

The diagnosis of bacterial disease in freshwater unionid mussels has been hindered by a lack of baseline information regarding the microbial communities associated with these animals. In this study, we cultured and identified bacteria from the hemolymph of stable mussel populations from the upper Mississippi River basin and compared results to those from mussel populations experiencing a...

Exploring age- and sex-specific survival rates provides insight regarding population behavior and life-history trait evolution, but many population studies exclude males. Accordingly, our understanding of how age-specific patterns of survival, including actuarial senescence, compare between the sexes remains inadequate. Using 35 years of mark-recapture data for 7,516 male Weddell seals

Sensor-based environmental monitoring networks are beginning to provide the large-scale, long-term data required to address important fundamental and applied questions in ecology. However, the data quality from deployed sensors can be difficult and costly to ensure. In this study, we use maintenance records from the 12-year history of Louisiana’s Coastwide Reference Monitoring System...

Understanding the effects of hurricanes and other large storms on ecological communities and the post-event recovery in these communities can guide management and ecosystem restoration. This is particularly important for communities impacted by invasive species, as the hurricane may affect control efforts. Here we consider the effect of a hurricane on tree communities in southern Florida...

Increasing demands for energy have generated interest in expanding oil and gas production on the North Slope of Alaska, raising questions about the resilience of barren-ground caribou populations to new development. Although the amount of habitat lost directly to energy development in the Arctic will likely be relatively small, there are significant concerns about habitat that may be...

Divergent movement strategies have enabled wildlife populations to adapt to environmental change. In recent decades, the Southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) has developed a divergent movement strategy in response to diminishing sea ice where the majority of the subpopulation (73–85%) stays on the sea ice in summer and the remaining bears move to land...

The availability of a food subsidy has the potential to influence the condition, behavior, fitness, and population dynamics of a species. Since the early 2000s, monitoring efforts along the coast of northern Alaska indicated a higher proportion of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) of the southern Beaufort Sea (SB) subpopulation come onshore and feed at subsistence-harvested bowhead whale...

Understanding the response of grass carp to flow and turbulence regimes during early life stages is fundamental to monitoring and controlling their spread. A comprehensive set of hydrodynamic experiments was conducted with live grass carp eggs and larvae, to better understand their drifting and swimming patterns with 3 different in-stream obstructions: (1) a gravel bump, (2) a single...

Drylands cover 41% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, play a critical role in global ecosystem function, and are home to over two billion people. Like other biomes, drylands face increasing pressure from global change, but many of these ecosystems are close to tipping points, which, if crossed, can lead to abrupt transitions and persistent degraded states. Their limited but variable...

Lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) were discovered in Yellowstone Lake in 1994 and their population expanded dramatically despite intensive suppression. The lake is species-depauperate, with no major lake trout embryo predators. We hypothesized that without this predation threat, lake trout free embryo feeding and growth may be greater than in their native range, leading to increased...

The key to Thick-billed Longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii) management is providing short, sparsely vegetated native grasslands of adequate size. Mixed-grass prairies can be made suitable for breeding Thick-billed Longspurs by implementing moderate-to-heavy or season-long grazing. Thick-billed Longspurs have been reported to use habitats with 5–42 centimeters (cm) average vegetation height...