Publications

In August 2020, outbreaks of coronavirus disease were confirmed on mink farms in Utah, USA. We surveyed mammals captured on and around farms for evidence of infection or exposure. Free-ranging mink, presumed domestic escapees, exhibited high antibody titers, suggesting a potential severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 transmission pathway to native wildlife.

Demographic models enhance understanding of drivers of population growth and inform conservation efforts to prevent population declines and extinction. For species with complex life histories, however, parameterizing demographic models is challenging because some life stages can be difficult to study directly. Integrated population models (IPMs) empower researchers to estimate vital...

Plague is a non-native disease in North America that reduces survival of many mammals. Previous studies have focused on epizootic plague which causes acute mortality events and dramatic declines in local abundance. We know much less about enzootic plague which causes less punctuated reductions in survival and abundance of infected populations. As a result, enzootic plague is much more...

Climate change and non-native species are considered two of the biggest threats to native salmonids in North America. We evaluated how non-native salmonids and stream temperature and discharge were associated with Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri) distribution, abundance, and body size to gain a more complete understanding of the existing threats to native...

Private landowners are important actors in landscape-level wildfire risk management. Accordingly, wildfire programs and policy encourage wildland–urban interface homeowners to engage with local organizations to properly mitigate wildfire risk on their parcels. We investigate whether parcel-level wildfire risk assessment data, commonly used to inform community-level planning and resource...

During the Pacific marine heatwave of 2014–2016, abundance and quality of several key forage fish species in the Gulf of Alaska were simultaneously reduced throughout the system. Capelin (Mallotus catervarius), sand lance (Ammodytes personatus), and herring (Clupea pallasii) populations were at historically low levels, and within this community abrupt declines in portfolio effects...

Hepatitis B viruses belong to a family of circular, double-stranded DNA viruses that infect a range of organisms, with host responses that vary from mild infection to chronic infection and cancer. The white sucker hepatitis B virus (WSHBV) was first described in the white sucker (Catostomus commersonii), a freshwater teleost, and belongs to the genus Parahepadnavirus. At present, the...

The presence of many pathogens varies in a predictable manner with latitude, with infections decreasing from the equator towards the poles. We investigated the geographic trends of pathogens infecting a widely distributed carnivore: the gray wolf (Canis lupus). Specifically, we investigated which variables best explain and predict geographic trends in seroprevalence across North American...

Choosing whether or not to migrate is an important life history decision for many fishes. Here we combine data from physical captures and detections on autonomous passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag antennas to study migration in an endangered fish, the humpback chub (Gila cypha). We develop hidden Markov mark-recapture models with and without antenna detections and find that the...

In recent years, benthic algae have been increasing in abundance in the littoral zones of oligotrophic lakes, but causality has been hard to assign. We used field and laboratory experiments to explore the implications of increasing water temperature and nutrient availability for benthic algal assemblages and ecosystem processes in a Colorado alpine lake. We tested the effect of nutrient...

The response of macrophage aggregates in fish to a variety of environmental stressors has been useful as a biomarker of exposure to habitat degradation. Total volume of macrophage aggregates (MAV) was estimated in the liver and spleen of white perch Morone americana from Chesapeake Bay using stereological approaches. Hepatic and splenic MAV were compared between fish populations from the...

A Gram-stain-negative, strictly anaerobic, non-motile, rod-shaped bacterium, designated SFB93T, was isolated from the intertidal sediments of South San Francisco Bay, located near Palo Alto, CA, USA. SFB93T was capable of acetylenotrophic and diazotrophic growth, grew at 22–37 °C, pH 6.3–8.5 and in the presence of 10–45 g l−1 NaCl. Phylogenetic analyses based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing...