Publications

Changes in the structure of the subalpine vegetation of Palila Critical Habitat on the southwestern slope of Mauna Kea Volcano, Hawai‘i, were analyzed using 12 metrics of change in māmane (Sophora chrysophylla) and naio (Myoporum sandwicense) trees surveyed on plots in 2000 and 2014. These two dominant species were analyzed separately, and changes in their structure indicated changes in...

Relatively little attention has been paid to the economic potentials and limitations of tropical timber production and management at smallholder scales, with the most relevant research focusing on community forestry efforts. As a rare tropical example of long-lasting small-scale timber production, in this study we explore the economics of smallholder vertically integrated timber use to...

Hawaiʻi, an archipelago of the most isolated inhabited islands on the planet, faces unique and extreme challenges to its biodiversity. We examined how the conservation community has responded to these challenges and how the responses have changed over time, using twenty years of abstracts from the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference, a yearly gathering of the majority of scientists, managers...

Occupation of native ecosystems by invasive plant species alters their structure and/or function. In Hawaii, a subset of introduced plants is regarded as extremely harmful due to competitive ability, ecosystem modification, and biogeochemical habitat degradation. By controlling this subset of highly invasive ecosystem modifiers, conservation managers could significantly reduce native...

Freed and Cann (2013) criticized our use of linear models to assess trends in the status of Hawaiian forest birds through time (Camp et al. 2009a, 2009b, 2010) by questioning our sampling scheme, whether we met model assumptions, and whether we ignored short-term changes in the population time series. In the present paper, we address these concerns and reiterate that our results do not...

Plant–pollinator mutualisms are disrupted by a variety of competitive interactions between introduced and native floral visitors. The invasive western yellowjacket wasp, Vespula pensylvanica, is an aggressive nectar thief of the dominant endemic Hawaiian tree species, Metrosideros polymorpha. We conducted a large-scale, multiyear manipulative experiment to investigate the impacts of V

A key factor contributing to the decline in the population of Pisonia grandis on Rose Atoll is an infestation of the non-native scale, Pulvinaria urbicola (Homoptera: Coccidae). Ants, in facultative relationships with scale insects, may facilitate scale population growth and increase their effect on plant hosts. Three ant species found on Rose Atoll, Tetramorium bicarinatum, T...

The arthropod community associated with tree bark contains a wide variety of taxa but is poorly described, particularly in Hawaiʽi. Our overall goals were to evaluate the abundance of arthropods available to foraging birds and how variation in bark substrates may contribute to arthropod distributions in native forests. Our study aimed to identify this fauna on the dominant canopy-forming...

Predicting how migratory animals respond to changing climatic conditions requires knowledge of how climatic events affect each phase of the annual cycle and how those effects carry-over to subsequent phases. We utilized a 17-year migration dataset to examine how El Niño-Southern Oscillation climatic events in geographically different regions of the Western hemisphere carry-over to impact...

Hawaiian hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus semotus) vocalizations were recorded using Anabat SD1 and Song Meter SM2Bat ultrasonic recorders at four monitoring stations in Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park on the island of Hawai‘i. We hypothesize that echolocation call events are more numerous during the reproductive season of this bat. Bat detectors recorded from 1700 to 0730 hrs on a...

Various types of evidence have been promulgated as proof for the effects of feral cats on wildlife, typically including numerous studies on predation inferred from diet, mortality attributed to pathogens, and photographic or videographic documentation. The strength of these types of evidence is often short of conclusive. For example, studies of predation inferred from diet provide weak...

We conducted field trials to assess several different methods of estimating the abundance of four endangered Hawaiian waterbirds: the Hawaiian duck (Anas wyvilliana), Hawaiian coot (Fulica alai), Hawaiian common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus sandvicensis) and Hawaiian stilt (Himantopus mexicanus knudseni). At two sites on Oʽahu, James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge and Hamakua Marsh...