Publications

Potential acute and chronic human health effects associated with exposure to cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins, including respiratory symptoms, are an understudied public health concern. We examined the relationship between estimated cyanobacteria biomass and the frequency of respiratory-related hospital visits for residents living near Green Bay, Lake Michigan, Wisconsin during 2017–2019...

Wildlife diseases are a major global threat to biodiversity. Boreal toads (Anaxyrus [Bufo] boreas) are a state-endangered species in the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, and a species of concern in Wyoming, largely due to lethal skin infections caused by the amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). We performed conservation and landscape genomic...

We present the validation methodology and results of Dynamic Surface Water eXtent from Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (DSWx-HLS). The DSWx-HLS product is the first of the DSWx suite, comprised of products each which map water from Earth Observation optical and SAR satellites. We detail the generation of high-resolution (3 m) validation datasets from a globally-stratified sample of dry...

Animal behavior can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly to observe in the field directly. Innovative modeling methods, such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), allow researchers to infer unobserved animal behaviors from movement data, and implementations often assume that transitions between states occur multiple times. However, some behavioral shifts of interest, such as parturition...

No abstract available.

The increase of developed land changes the Earth’s ecosystems and, in doing so, impacts the natural environment and further affects the services it provides to humans. Urban growth and associated land cover transitions alter the thermal and physical properties of the land surface, resulting in surface temperature change in urban areas. In this study, we integrated both land cover and...

Urban development and associated land cover and land use change alter the thermal, hydrological, and physical properties of the land surface. Urban areas usually exhibit relatively warmer air and surface temperatures than surrounding non-urban lands, a phenomenon recognized as Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI). As urban areas continue to develop and the climate continues to warm, it has...

The Mekong River provides water, food security, and many other valuable benefits to the more than 60 million Southeast Asian residents living within its basin. However, the Mekong River Basin is increasingly stressed by changes in climate, land cover, and infrastructure. These changes can affect water quantity and quality and exacerbate related hazards such as land subsidence and...

The study of nocturnally active bats is difficult even for those species that seasonally congregate. This challenge is particularly acute for ‘ōpe‘ape‘a (Hawaiian hoary bat; Lasiurus semotus) because of its solitary foliage-roosting behavior. Yet surveys are essential for conservation and management of this endangered species and only land mammal endemic to the Hawaiian Islands. We...

A general limitation in assessing the accuracy of land cover mapping is the availability of ground truth data. At sites where ground truth is not available, potentially inaccurate proxy datasets are used for sub-field-scale resolution investigations at large spatial scales, i.e., in the Contiguous United States. The USDA/NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a popular agricultural land cover...

No abstract available.

Using climate model ensembles containing members that exhibit very high climate sensitivities to increasing CO2 concentrations can result in biased projections. Various methods have been proposed to ameliorate this ‘hot model’ problem, such as model emulators or model culling. Here, we utilize Bayesian Model Averaging as a framework to address this problem without resorting to outright...