Publications

Much attention has been placed on the role that under-roadway culverts may have in inhibiting upstream fish movement because of altered hydrology and unsuitable conditions for accessing or swimming through the culvert. Other culvert effects related to habitat alterations or disturbance to macroinvertebrate communities have received relatively little attention. Entities responsible for...

White-nose syndrome is an emerging fungal disease that has devastated hibernating bat populations across eastern North America. The causal pathogen, Pseudogymnoascus destructans (PD), is a psychrophilic fungus with a known maximal growth temperature of 20 C. Although it is widely speculated that PD is primarily spread between hibernacula by the movement of bats, experimental evidence is...

Birds that nest on the ground in open areas, such as Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) and Interior Least Terns (Sternula antillarum athalassos), are exposed to high temperatures in thermally stressful environments. As a result, some ground-nesting avian species have adapted behavioral strategies to maintain thermal regulation of eggs and themselves. We assessed the impact of sand...

No abstract available.

Chemical contaminants are a threat to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, with mercury (Hg) among the most prevalent causes of impairment. Despite this, large-scale patterns of Hg concentrations, and the potential risks to fish, wildlife, and humans across the watershed, are poorly understood. We compiled fish Hg data from state monitoring programs and recent research efforts to address this...

Premise Determining which traits characterize strategies of coexisting species is important to developing trait‐based models of plant communities. First, global dimensions may not exist locally. Second, the degree to which traits and trait spectra constitute independent dimensions of functional variation at various scales continues to be refined. Finally, traits may be associated with...

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...