Publications

Mass mortality events provide valuable insight into biological extremes and also ecological interactions more generally. The sea star wasting epidemic that began in 2013 catalyzed study of the microbiome, genetics, population dynamics, and community ecology of several high-profile species inhabiting the northeastern Pacific but exposed a dearth of information on the diversity...

Baseline information about declining North American shorebird populations is essential to determine the effects of global warming at low-lying coastal areas of the Arctic and subarctic, where numerous taxa breed, and to assess population recovery throughout their range. We estimated population sizes on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea. We...

Highway runoff is a source of sediment and associated constituents to downstream waterbodies that can be managed with the use of stormwater-control measures that reduce sediment loads. The use of open-graded friction course (OGFC) pavement has been identified as a method to reduce loads from highway runoff because it retains sediment in pavement voids; however, few datasets are available...

The key to Loggerhead Shrike (Lanius ludovicianus) management is providing open grasslands with scattered trees and shrubs for foraging, nesting, and perching. Loggerhead Shrikes have been reported to use habitats with 20–266 centimeters (cm) vegetation height, greater than or equal to (≥) 10 percent grass cover, 3–48 percent forb cover, 2–25 percent shrub cover, 3–40 percent bare ground...

We investigated the spatial overlap, diet, isotopic niche, and growth of juvenile lean and siscowet lake charr (Salvelinus namaycush) in Lake Superior to address concerns of potential competition with implications to the study of resource polymorphism. Catch data revealed the greatest levels of sympatry in waters from 40 to 60 m. Juvenile lean and siscowet diet changed ontogenetically...

Current pollinator survey methods exhibit bias, require highly-trained practitioners, and are difficult to scale to large sample sizes. High-throughput sequencing of terrestrial eDNA could provide a complementary tool for studying pollinator communities, but eDNA methods have not been extensively evaluated. We conducted metagenetic analysis of whole arthropod community eDNA from 20...

Although deep learning models for stream temperature (Ts) have recently shown exceptional accuracy, they have limited interpretability and cannot output untrained variables. With hybrid differentiable models, neural networks (NNs) can be connected to physically based equations (called structural priors) to output intermediate variables such as water source fractions (specifying what...

Innovations in geodesy enable widespread analysis of glacier surface elevation change and geodetic mass balance. However, coincident glacier area data are less widely available, causing inconsistent handling of glacier area change. Here we quantify the bias introduced into meters water equivalent (m w.e.) specific geodetic mass balance results when using a fixed, maximum glacier area...

Vegetation and biological soil crust (biocrust) cover can have a stabilizing effect on dunes by fixing sediment in-place and increasing surface roughness, thus limiting dune mobility, sediment transport, and erosion. These biological effects influence rates of aeolian activity and thus surficial changes, though variability in wind and sediment supply may obscure these topographic effects...

The development and application of approaches to detect and quantify environmental DNA (eDNA) have potential to improve our understanding of the distribution, abundance, and health of Atlantic Salmon Salmo salar and Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. Here, we review 61 articles focusing on eDNA applications pertaining to salmon occupying natural habitat and aquaculture facilities in the...

Aims Invasion by annual grasses (IAGs) and concomitant increases in wildfire are impacting many drylands globally, and an understanding of factors that contribute to or detract from community resistance to IAGs is needed to inform postfire restoration interventions. Prefire vegetation condition is often unknown in rangelands but it likely affects variation in postfire invasion resistance...

We paired mercury (Hg) concentrations in dragonfly larvae with water chemistry in 29 U.S. national parks to highlight how ecological and biogeochemical context (habitat, dissolved organic carbon [DOC]) influence drivers of Hg bioaccumulation. Although prior studies have defined influences of biogeochemical variables on Hg production and bioaccumulation, it has been challenging to...