Publications

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The first Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found widespread, accelerating declines in Earth’s biodiversity and associated benefits to people from nature. Addressing these trends will require science-based policy responses to reduce impacts, especially at national to local scales. Effective scaling of science-policy...

Submarine canyons are often morphologically complex features in the deep sea contributing to habitat heterogeneity. In addition, they act as major conduits of organic matter from the shallow productive shelf to the food deprived deep-sea, promoting gradients in food resources and areas of sediment resuspension and deposition. This study focuses on the Baltimore and Norfolk canyons, in...

What factors drive population variability through space and time? Here we assess patterns of abundance of seven species of gall wasps in three genera occurring on the leaves of valley oaks (Quercus lobata ) at 10 sites throughout this species' statewide range in California, from 2000 to 2006. Our primary goals were to understand the factors driving variability in gall abundance and to...

Despite broad recognition that water is a major limiting factor in arid ecosystems, we lack an empirical understanding of how this resource is shared and distributed among neighbouring plants. Intraspecific variability can further contribute to this variation via divergent life‐history traits, including root architecture. We investigated these questions in the shrub Artemisia tridentata...

There is global interest in quantifying changing biodiversity in human-modified landscapes. Ecoacoustics may offer a promising pathway for supporting multi-taxa monitoring, but its scalability has been hampered by the sonic complexity of biodiverse ecosystems and the imperfect detectability of animal-generated sounds. The acoustic signature of a habitat, or soundscape, contains...

In Lake Erie, cisco Coregonus artedi once supported one of the most valuable freshwater fisheries on earth, yet overfishing caused their eventual extirpation from the lake. With warming lake temperatures, some have questioned whether Lake Erie still contains suitable oxythermal conditions for cisco. Using published oxythermal thresholds for cisco and oxythermal profiles from Lake Erie...

Landbirds in the Gulf of Mexico region include an ecologically diverse group of taxa that depend on a wide range of terrestrial habitats and the airspace above them. For the GoMAMN region of the Gulf of Mexico, the Landbird Working Group identified 19 species from 12 families as priorities for monitoring (Table 3.1). In addition, all species that stopover within the GoMAMN region during...

We tested coyote (Canis latrans), fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus, Vulpes vulpes), and raccoon (Procyon lotor) sera for influenza A virus (IAV) exposure. We found 2/139 samples (1 coyote, 1 raccoon) had IAV antibodies and hemagglutination inhibition assays revealed the antibodies to the 2009/2010 H1N1 human pandemic virus or to the 2007 human seasonal H1N1 virus.

Although most countries banned manufacturing of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) over 40 years ago, PCBs remain a global concern for wildlife and human health due to high bioaccumulation and biopersistance. PCB uptake mechanisms have been well studied in many taxa; however, less is known about depuration rates and how post-exposure diet can influence PCB concentrations and immune...

The transition from species in allopatry to sympatry, i.e., the co-occurrence zone of competing species, allows for investigation of forces structuring range limits and provides evidence of the evolutionary and population responses of competing species, including mechanisms facilitating co-occurrence (e.g., character displacement). The Shenandoah Salamander (Plethodon shenandoah), an...

Carbon stock trends of the knees of Taxodium distichum likely vary across climate gradients of the southeastern United States and contribute an unknown quantity of “teal” carbon to inland freshwater wetlands. Knee metrics (e.g., density, height, biomass) were measured in mixed T. distichum swamps across the Mississippi River Alluvial Valley (MRAV) from Illinois to Louisiana. Based on...