Publications

Traveling through Yellowstone National Park (YNP), visitors frequently stop to enjoy the park’s birds: small songbirds flitting about the willows, sandhill cranes engaged in their ritual mating dances, or myriad species of waterfowl loafing in one of the park's many wetlands. Typically while driving the roads of YNP, a majority of visitors consider a stopped car and raised binoculars a...

No abstract available.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Wildland Fire Science Program produces fundamental information to identify the causes of wildfires, understand the impacts and benefits of both wildfires and prescribed fires, and help prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events. Our fire scientists provide information and develop tools that are widely used by stakeholders to make decisions before, during...

Determining a species’ habitat use is an essential first step in any wildlife conservation action. We described habitat use, animal movements and probable lambing areas in a remote, restricted-access region of the Mojave Desert. Differences in habitat use between sexes was apparent, supporting the often-reported concept of risk-aversion by females. Animals exhibited low variability in...

Significant Findings for Year 2017: 1) Offshore spring total phosphorus (TP) in 2017 was 4.4 µg/L; values remained stable since 2001. Offshore soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) remained low (1.1 µg/L) in 2017; Apr/May – Oct mean values have been stable in nearshore and offshore habitats since 1998 (range, 0.4 – 3.3 µg/L). Apr/May – Oct mean TP concentrations were low at both nearshore...

Introduction This geologic map of the Greater Antilles and the Virgin Islands is a compilation of information from the literature, integrated to provide a seamless geologic map of the region. The geology shown on sheet 1 covers Cuba, the island of Hispaniola, which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands...

Environmental drivers of population vital rates, such as temperature and precipitation, often vary at short time scales, and these fluctuations can have important impacts on population dynamics. However, relationships between survival and environmental conditions are typically modeled at coarse temporal scales, ignoring the role of daily environmental variation in survival. Our goal was...

Community measures collected at a single instance or over a short temporal period rarely provide a complete accounting of biological diversity. The gap between such “snapshot” measures of diversity and actual diversity can be especially large in systems that undergo great temporal variation in environmental conditions. To adequately quantify diversity in these temporally varying...

We genotyped 7,588 brook trout representing 406 collections from across the State of North Carolina (Figure 1) at 12 microsatellite loci (King et al. 2012). The vast majority of collections appeared to represent single populations, based on general conformance to HardyWeinberg equilibrium and limited evidence for linkage-disequilibrium. Allelic diversity was low to moderate relative to...

This study examines Holocene impacts of changes in climate, land use, and sea-level rise (SLR) on sediment accretion, carbon accumulation rates (CAR), and vegetation along a transect of tidal freshwater forested wetlands (TFFW) to oligohaline marsh along the Waccamaw River, South Carolina (4 sites) and along the Savannah River, Georgia (4 sites). We use pollen, plant macrofossils...

Understanding the importance of biotic interactions in driving the distribution and abundance of species is a central goal of plant ecology. Early vascular plants likely colonized land occupied by biocrusts — photoautotrophic, surface‐dwelling soil communities comprised of cyanobacteria, bryophytes, lichens and fungi — suggesting biotic interactions between biocrusts and plants have been...

American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) have varied migration patterns and harvesting pressure throughout their range, potentially leading to regional differences in population dynamics. Here, a multi-state mark–recapture model was used to estimate annual survival and exchange rates of adult horseshoe crabs across three geographic regions in Long Island, NY (South Shore, North...