Publications

Executive Summary The purpose of this report is to provide the Marine Corps with a summary of abundance, breeding activity, demography, and habitat use of endangered Least Bell’s Vireos (Vireo bellii pusillus) at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California (MCBCP or Base). The report presents results of vireo surveys and monitoring in 2024 and summarizes a subset of data collected from...

Northern snakehead Channa argus (Cantor, 1842) is an aquatic invasive fish species in the United States with first documented occurrence in the wild in the 2000s. Management efforts to control their populations in the eastern United States are ongoing. In the Mississippi River basin, limited resources have been allocated to control its distribution, after initial detection and rapid...

No abstract available.

Conservation translocations are an increasingly common and often necessary component of recovering species that have become extirpated from portions of their range. Understanding and ameliorating potential threats that reduce the likelihood of successful population establishment at recipient sites is a key component of successful translocation planning. We examined multiple potential...

Ephemerally flooded playas are common in the southwestern United States and globally in drylands. Often formed in closed basins, playas are depressions which inundate infrequently from local precipitation and streamflow produced near the playa or from upland areas. Few studies have quantified the hydrologic connectivity between upland catchments and playas using observations. Here, we...

Federally managed public lands and waters receive about 1 billion recreational visits each year. Data on these visitors can aid in guiding policy decisions, managing resources effectively, and communicating the economic contributions of lands and waters. This report explores the methods used by agencies to collect data on aspects of recreational visitor use to Federal lands and waters...

Accurate mapping of post-fire surviving trees is important for tracking forest recovery and prioritizing land management decisions. Satellite-based remote sensing is an effective method to assess post-fire forest conditions. Traditionally, differenced satellite-derived burn severity indices are computed by differencing one year pre- and post-fire spectral reflectance values. Differenced...

The hydrologic regime of the upper Mississippi River (UMR) has become wetter, with greater discharges, longer-lasting high-flow conditions, and seasonal shifts in these patterns over the past several decades. How these changes are expressed spatially as floodplain inundation area, frequency, depth, duration, and timing is not well understood. It is also unclear to what degree spatial...

Across the western United States, introductions of non-native fish into historically fishless mountain lakes have impacted native biota. Understanding the impacts of fish introductions is essential for conservation in Olympic National Park, a Biosphere Reserve. We reconstructed fish plantings using records dating back to 1930, followed by environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys to estimate the...

Increasing application of acoustic telemetry for determining survival, migration and habitat use of fishes highlights the need to improve interpretation of tracks that end abruptly: when is fishing mortality, predation, or some other cause to be inferred? Significant technological advances have led to the development of tags that “sense” predation and can be used to infer information...

Novel stressors like climate change and biological invasions alter ecological communities, resulting in changes to ecosystem services and biodiversity (that is, ecological transformation). Most ecological transformation research focuses on plants, but animals are likely affected by and plausibly mediate the extent, impact, and pace of transformations. In western North America, where...

Background Detailed studies of foraging behavior are needed for scientific management of the endangered rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis) in the disjunct and ecologically differentiated habitats it presently occupies. Current knowledge gaps hinder recovery planning but are challenging to redress through direct observation of rare interactions in the field.Methods We used genetic...