Publications

Topock Marsh is a 1,637-hectare (4,045-acre) wetland adjacent to the Colorado River near Needles, California, and a main feature of Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in cooperation with the Bureau of Reclamation, began construction of an infrastructure improvement project in 2010 to increase the efficiency of water use and to help protect the...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is implementing a landscape approach to resource management (hereafter, landscape approach) to more effectively work with partners and understand the effects of management decisions. A landscape approach is a set of concepts and principles used to guide resource management when multiple stakeholders are involved and goals include diverse and...

The Central Valley of California is one of the most important regions for wintering waterbirds in North America despite extensive anthropogenic landscape modification and decline of historical wetlands there. Like many other mediterranean-climate ecosystems across the globe, the Central Valley has been subject to a burgeoning human population and expansion and intensification of...

The delineation of priority areas in western North America for managing Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) represents a broad-scale experiment in conservation biology. The strategy of limiting spatial disturbance and focusing conservation actions within delineated areas may benefit the greatest proportion of Greater Sage-Grouse. However, land use under normal restrictions...

Lateral flow separation occurs in rivers where banks exhibit strong curvature. In canyon-boundrivers, lateral recirculation zones are the principal storage of fine-sediment deposits. A parallelized,three-dimensional, turbulence-resolving model was developed to study the flow structures along lateralseparation zones located in two pools along the Colorado River in Marble Canyon. The model...

Introduction The purpose of this document is to describe a strategy by which monitoring and research data in the natural and social sciences will be collected, analyzed, and provided to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), its bureaus, and to the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP) in support of implementation of the Glen Canyon Dam Long-Term Experimental and...

Despite concern over the conservation status of many Mongolian salmonids and the importance of their ecological role in Mongolia's aquatic ecosystems, little is known about their basic biology. Hovsgol grayling (Thymallus nigrescens) is endemic to Lake Hovsgol, Mongolia and listed as endangered on the Mongolian Red List. Baikal grayling (T. baicalensis) and lenok (Brachymystax lenok) are...

Sites used for roosting represent a key habitat requirement for many species of birds because availability and quality of roost sites can influence individual fitness. Birds select roost sites based on numerous factors, requirements, and motivations, and selection of roosts can be dynamic in time and space because of various ecological and environmental influences. For sandhill cranes...

Fish feeding ecology has been shown to vary over a 24-h period in terms of the prey consumed and feeding intensity. Consequently, in order to best determine the interspecific feeding associations within a fish community, examination of the diet at multiple times over a 24-h period is often necessary. We examined the diel feeding ecology of three fish species that were numerically...

The re-colonization of the Santa Barbara channel by sea otters brings these ESA-listed marine mammals closer to active oil and gas production facilities, shipping lanes and naturally occurring oil and gas seeps. However, the degree to which sea otters may actually be affected by human-caused oil spills or exposure to natural oil seeps is currently unknown. Between 2012 and 2014, the U.S

Endangered whooping cranes (Grus americana) of the Aransas-Wood Buffalo population migrate through the Great Plains twice each year. Although there is much interest in conservation and management for this species, information regarding characteristics of nocturnal roost sites used during migration has been limited and based largely on incidental observations. Using high-quality location...

Hydroacoustic sampling of low-density fish in shallow water can lead to low sample sizes of naturally variable target strength (TS) estimates, resulting in both sparse and variable data. Increasing maximum beam compensation (BC) beyond conventional values (i.e., 3 dB beam width) can recover more targets during data analysis; however, data quality decreases near the acoustic beam edges...