Publications

Early in the morning of 10 August 2025, a >64 × 106–cubic meter landslide struck Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The landslide was preconditioned by glacial retreat caused by climate change. The resulting 481-meter runup megatsunami followed an initial 100-meter-high breaking wave traveling at >70 meters per second. The landslide was preceded by several days of microseismicity, which...

Species diversity is the foundation of many ecological disciplines. This metric is often approximated using species richness and evenness, even though actual richness likely exceeds observations due to imperfect sampling methods. Estimating the “true” species richness, which includes identifying the number of missing species, has intrigued ecologists for decades. We adopted a parametric...

Modeling plays a vital role in understanding and managing complex environmental systems, but its credibility and quality depend heavily on a comprehensive set of defensible model activities and practices, especially when the system of interest is plagued with uncertainties and conflicting stakeholder perspectives. This paper proposes a catalogue of Do's and Don'ts to guide modelers in...

We assembled and annotated a chromosome-level genome for the Western Spadefoot, Spea hammondii (Anura, Scaphiopodidae) representing one of only three amphibians included in the California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP). Spea hammondii is a vernal pool breeding anuran native to California and northwestern Baja California which has undergone both range contractions and local...

Monitoring suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) is essential to better understand how sediment transport could adversely affect water availability for human communities and ecosystems. Aquatic remote sensing methods are increasingly utilized to estimate SSC and turbidity in rivers; however, an evaluation of their quantitative performance is limited. This study evaluates the performance...

We compiled and verified a comprehensive inventory dataset of communication tower infrastructure across the range of the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) and Gunnison sage-grouse (Centrocercus minimus), two species of conservation concern that are viewed as ecosystem health indicators for the entire sagebrush biome within the United States. Our dataset includes all known...

Connectivity is a multifaceted concept that has important implications for the management and conservation of marine and freshwater fishes. We developed a conceptual framework that encompasses multiple, interrelated categories of connectedness, including landscape (e.g., structural, functional) connectivity and ecological (e.g., trophic, genetic, demographic) connectivity, that together...

Deep beneath the ocean, giant slabs of rock slide beneath one another in areas called subduction zones. These powerful movements shape the planet by building mountains, creating fiery volcanoes, and even causing huge earthquakes. Scientists study subduction zones to understand why these natural events happen and where and how they might occur so we can be better prepared. One important...

Sea ice affects Earth's climate system on both regional and global scales. Its incorporation into climate can be used to achieve more accurate predictions of future climate. However, instrumental records of sea-ice concentration do not extend earlier than 1978. In an effort to extend this record, we constructed a proxy using the generalized additive model based on relative abundances of...

Land cover information is essential for understanding Earth’s surface dynamics and how vegetation, water, soil, climate, and terrain interact. The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) has been the authoritative source for consistent U.S. land cover mapping. To extend NLCD’s temporal resolution and reduce production latency, we developed the Land Cover Artificial Mapping System (LCAMS)—a...

Understanding how environmental changes affect the health of organisms and ecosystems is complex, but recent interdisciplinary advances and the recognition of immune function as a dynamic mediator offer exciting progress. Environmental immunotoxicology in teleost fishes is evolving beyond cataloguing stressors towards a mechanistic, integrative framework that leverages omics, in vivo...

Source–station distance is a central input to ground‐motion models (GMMs) for predicting seismic shaking. GMM development uses distance metrics including the Joyner–Boore distance, which is the shortest distance from an observation point to the surface projection of the earthquake rupture, and Rrup the shortest distance to the rupture in three dimensions. Thompson and Baltay (2018)...