Publications

Congressional authorization of the Water Resource Development Act of 2020 increased funding for the Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) program and its Long Term Resource Monitoring (LTRM) element. With adequate resources there is an opportunity for LTRM to expand its understanding of the Upper Mississippi River System, address unmet partner information needs, and better inform...

Natural resource managers strive to improve restoration efficiency across the vast network of public lands of the United States, seeking the best return on investment through innovation, geographic prioritization, and adaptive management. This challenge is exemplified by ecosystems dominated by sagebrush (Artemisia spp.), which occur across the western United States and have been...

Empiricists and modellers use information on energy density, proximate composition, stable isotopes, fatty acids, thiamine, and bioaccumulative tracers (e.g., PCBs and mercury) to understand the state and inter-relationships of aquatic food webs. Data exist in many published and unpublished sources, but are not consolidated in an easily accessible database that would serve as a vital...

Conservation science struggles with an ongoing divide between research and action. Given its history of broad public engagement and multi-scale management coordination, avian conservation typifies many of the challenges, successes, and opportunities across the broader field of conservation and is rich with examples that may guide solutions-oriented conservation science. In semi...

We fit a binomial mixture (N-mixture) model to lek (breeding area) count data to estimate annual population sizes of greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; sage-grouse) within Oregon between 2017 and 2024. Population estimates were delineated among 24 priority areas for conservation, and additional sources of information were considered, including male-to-female sex ratios, lek...

Invasive carp, including Silver Carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) and Grass Carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), are increasing their range within the Mississippi River Basin, threatening native fishes and ecosystem function. We conducted a 3-year field test of a multi-modal deterrent that uses sound, bubbles, and light to test its ability to impede upstream passage by invasive carp. The...

Congressionally designated wilderness offers the highest level of land protection in the USA, comparable to category 1b wilderness as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, yet wilderness areas face impacts of climate change. Researchers and managers increasingly recognize the immense challenge of stewarding wilderness in a changing climate. Although responding to...

Evidence-based scientific information can help support defensible decision making in the management of public lands. This report sought to identify current (2024–25) Federal agency research needs in southeastern Utah and to synthesize common management challenges and questions across jurisdictional boundaries. We implemented a science needs assessment focused on lands managed by the...

Limited plant establishment creates demographic bottlenecks that can alter vegetation trajectories in changing environments, yet it is unclear how common eco-evolutionary indicators of plant strategy shape early response to key stressors. We evaluated how early functional traits, phylogeny, and adult climate niche jointly explain seedling drought and freezing tolerance across 49 semi...

Restoring self-sustaining lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) populations has been a major management objective for decades across the species’ native range. Reproduction has been observed but recruitment has been limited in many areas of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Reef restoration and construction have been proposed to increase recruitment, leading to the construction of experimental...

This study explores the prediction of a continuous target variable that is primarily measured as an ordinal outcome. Interest in such prediction may occur given data from double- or two-phase sampling designs, where an auxiliary variable is measured at all sampling units and a target and predictor variable, X, at a subset of those units. This study focuses on the case where X is...