Publications

Adaptive management (AM) is widely recommended as an approach for learning to improve resource management, but successful AM projects remain relatively uncommon, with few documented examples applied by natural resource management agencies. We used AM to make recommendations for the management of native tallgrass prairie plant communities in western Minnesota and eastern North and South...

Birds often exhibit diagnostic traits that differ among individuals of the same species with regard to factors like sex, age, or breeding status. Shorebirds exhibit a wide diversity of colors, shapes, and sizes of their bills, and these traits are commonly used to determine the sex of individuals. In curlews (genus Numenius), length alone accurately separates the sexes in some species...

We used Pinpoint GPS-Argos tags to track migration of Pacific Golden-Plovers Pluvialis fulva in 2017 and 2018 from Moorea Island, at the extreme southeastern edge of the species’ winter range. Of 20 tagged birds, 13 uploaded locations during all or part of their northward migration. The birds departed in mid-April traveling a long (8,250–10,200 km) northwestward track. Ten individuals...

Aim Climate variability threatens to destabilize production in many ecosystems. Asynchronous species dynamics may buffer against such variability when a decrease in performance by some species is offset by an increase in performance of others. However, high climatic variability can eliminate species through stochastic extinctions or cause similar stress responses among species that...

Temperature has a fundamental influence on physical, chemical and biological processing in aquatic ecosystems. River temperatures respond to a diverse array of drivers including air temperature, streamflow, and thermal inputs, but the physical template has been shown to play a significant role in structuring spatial and temporal variation in water temperature. How these factors interact...

A hardy inhabitant of the subalpine zone of western North America, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is a keystone tree species in California’s subalpine forests, where it regularly defines the upper treeline in the Sierra Nevada, Cascade, Warner, and Klamath Mountains. Walking portions of the John Muir Trail in the southern Sierra Nevada, moving through extensive stands and mats of...

The project team sought to use real-world data to understand adverse effects to wildlife of renewable energy production that is critical to meeting California’s climate and clean energy goals. The project had three main components. First, a systematic literature review studied 20 peer-reviewed publications and 612 reports from other nonreviewed sources from 231 wind and solar facilities...

Respiratory disease is a key factor affecting the conservation and recovery of bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis ) populations. Innovative, minimally invasive tools such as gene transcription–based diagnostics have the potential to improve our understanding of the broad range of factors that can affect the health of wild sheep. Evaluation of transcript levels for genes representative of...

Field surveys for aquatic organisms provide critical information that is important for robust resource management. However, such surveys are expensive and labor intensive, particularly in large, remote landscapes like those that characterize much of Alaska. Traditionally, characterizing aquatic biodiversity necessitated the physical capture and identification of individual organisms...

A study was conducted in the lower Yakima River, Washington, during June–October 2019 to evaluate water temperature effects on adult sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) behavior. A total of 60 sockeye salmon adults were tagged with radio transmitters and monitored during the study. Fourteen of the fish were collected and tagged at Prosser Dam in late June and the remainder were collected...

The vast conifer forests of California’s Sierra Nevada range inspire awe and create lasting memories. The size and longevity of these trees make them seem both otherworldly and everlasting. Indeed, their grandeur is such that visitors may not appreciate how these forests are connected to the larger landscape, and so there is little understanding that something as common as a drought...

Because fish that enter the interior Delta have poorer survival than those emigrating via the Sacramento River, understanding the mechanisms that drive entrainment rates at side channel junctions is critically important for the management of imperiled juvenile salmon. Here, we implement a previously proposed process-based conceptual model to study entrainment rates based on three linked...