Publications

Under our current changing climate, plants and animals must respond to rising sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, and increasing air and water temperatures and concentrations of greenhouse gases, including atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). While some species may adapt to changing conditions, these factors have the potential to drive latitudinal and elevational shifts in species

A synthesis of 93 hydrologic records from across North and Central America, and adjacent tropical and Arctic islands, reveals centennial to millennial trends in the regional hydroclimates of the Common Era (CE; past 2000 years). The hydrological records derive from materials stored in lakes, bogs, caves, and ice from extant glaciers, which have the continuity through time to preserve low...

Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) in clearwater systems simultaneously provides habitat for invertebrate prey and acts as refugia for small fishes. Many fishes in Lake Erie rely on shallow, heavily vegetated bays as spawning grounds and the loss or absence of which is known to reduce recruitment in other systems. The Maumee River and Maumee Bay, which once had abundant macrophyte beds...

A study was conducted to identify habitat characteristics associated with age 0+ White Sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus Richardson, 1863) recruitment in three reaches of the Columbia River Basin: Skamania reach (consistent recruitment), John Day reach (intermittent/inconsistent recruitment), and Kootenai reach (no recruitment). Our modeling approach involved numerous steps. First, we...

Coastal wetlands around the Laurentian Great Lakes in North America have the potential to intercept surface water coming off of the landscape and reduce the amount of nutrients and sediment entering the lakes. However, extensive coastal wetland areas have been isolated behind dikes and thus have limited interaction with nutrient-rich waters that contribute to harmful algal blooms and...

Trout are one of the most culturally, economically, and ecologically important taxonomic groups of freshwater fishes worldwide (1). Native to all continents in the Northern Hemisphere, trout are a taxonomically diverse group of fishes belonging to 7 genera (Oncorhynchus, Salvelinus, Salmo, Hucho, Parahucho, Brachymystax, and Salvethymus) distributed across 52 countries. These coldwater...

Snags are important habitat features for many forest‐dwelling species, so reductions in the number of snags can lead to the loss of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Intentional snag creation is often used in managed forests to mitigate the long‐term declines of naturally created snags, yet information regarding the use of snags by wildlife across long timescales (>20 yr) is lacking and...

The impacts of dams and levees on the long-term (>130 years) discharge record was assessed along a ~1200 km segment of the Mississippi River between St. Louis, Missouri, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. To aid in our evaluation of dam impacts, we used data from the U.S. National Inventory of Dams to calculate the rate of reservoir expansion at five long-term hydrologic monitoring stations...

Oil and gas development is changing the landscape in many regions of the United States and globally. However, the nature, extent, and magnitude of landscape change and development, and precisely how this development compares to other ongoing land conversion (e.g. urban/sub-urban development, timber harvest) is not well understood. In this study, we examine land conversion from oil and...

In the current context of environmental changes, it is easy to see how extrinsic factors, such as shifts in sea surface temperature, food availability and accumulation of pollutants, can impact the health of marine mammals. However, intrinsic factors, including the genetic constitution of an individual, are also largely responsible for shaping health, particularly in terms of immune...

Despite the purported role of avian pox (Avipoxvirus spp.) in the decline of endemic Hawaiian birds, few studies have been conducted on the dynamics of this disease, its impact on free‐living avian populations, or its interactions with avian malaria (Plasmodium relictum). We conducted four longitudinal studies of 3–7 yr in length and used generalized linear models to evaluate cross...

Climatically driven changes in snow characteristics (snowfall, snowpack, and snowmelt) will affect hydrologic and ecological systems in Alaska over the coming century, yet there exist no projections of downscaled future snow pack metrics for the state of Alaska. We updated historical and projected snow day fraction (PSF, the fraction of days with precipitation falling as snow) from...