All Publications

The effects of agriculture and flood control practices accrued over more than a century have impaired aquatic habitats and their fish communities in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the historic floodplain of the Lower Mississippi River prior to leveeing. As a first step to conservation planning and adaptive management, we developed and tested a conceptual model of how changes to this...

The persistence of threatened wildlife species depends on successful conservation and restoration of habitats, but climate change and other stressors make these tasks increasingly challenging. Applying climate change vulnerability analyses to contemporary wildlife management can be difficult because most analyses predict direct effects of future climate on wildlife species at broad...

Geographic distribution models of environmentally stable isotopes (the so-called “isoscapes”) are widely employed in animal ecology, and wildlife forensics and conservation. However, the application of isoscapes is limited to elements and regions for which the spatial patterns have been estimated. Here, we focused on the ubiquitous yet less commonly used stable sulfur isotopes (δ34S). To...

Metabolism estimates organic carbon accumulation by primary productivity and removal by respiration. In rivers it is relevant to assessing trophic status and threats to river health such as hypoxia as well as greenhouse gas fluxes. We estimated metabolism in 17 rivers of the Illinois River basin (IRB) for a total of 15,176 days, or an average of 2.5 years per site. Daily estimates of...

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a highly contagious, fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by infectious prions (PrPCWD) affecting wild and captive cervids. Although experimental feeding studies have demonstrated prions in feces of crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos), coyotes (Canis latrans), and cougars (Puma concolor), the role of scavengers and predators in CWD epidemiology remains poorly

Microplastics (MPs) are environmental contaminants that are present in all environments and can enter the human body, accumulate in various organs, and cause harm through the ingestion of food, inhalation, and dermal contact. The connection between bowel and liver disease and the interplay between gut, liver, and flora has been conceptualized as the “gut-liver axis”. Microplastics can...

Critical to Atlantic sturgeon Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus recovery and monitoring is the ability to estimate abundance and identify age- and stock-specific threats to survival. As adult Atlantic sturgeon spend much of their lives broadly distributed in marine and estuarine environments, it is challenging to collect data needed to estimate these demographic parameters in the adult...

Objective Both electronic tags (e.g., acoustic and radio transmitters) and conventional external tags are used to evaluate movement and population dynamics of fish. External tags are also sometimes used to facilitate the recovery of internal electronic tags or other instrumentation because healing can make it difficult to identify fish with internal tags based on appearance alone. With...

The recent destruction of thousands of homes by lava flows from La Palma volcano, Canary Islands, and Nyiragongo volcano, Democratic Republic of Congo, serves as a reminder of the devastating impact that lava flows can have on communities living in volcanically active regions. Damage to buildings and infrastructure can have widespread and long-lasting effects on rehabilitation and...

The yǻyaguak (Mariana swiftlet; Aerodramus bartschi) is an endangered cave-nesting species historically found on Guam and the southern Mariana Islands, Micronesia. The population on Guam has been severely affected by the introduction of the brown treesnake Boiga irregularis. Population status assessments have, however, been challenging due to the limitations of traditional counting...

I investigate the long‐term, rigid motions of the 20 microplates identified by McCaffrey (2005,https://doi.org/10.1029/2004jb003307) within the Pacific‐North America plate boundary in southwestern United States. Those motions are described by the Euler vectors ( Ωi0 for the ith microplate) given by McCaffrey for each microplate. McCaffrey noticed that the Euler poles for those...

Living shorelines with salt marsh species, rock breakwaters, and sand nourishment were built along the coastal areas in the Glenn Martin National Wildlife Refuge, Maryland, in 2016 in response to Hurricane Sandy (2012). The Fog Point living shoreline at Glenn Martin National Wildlife Refuge was designed with the “headland - breakwater - embayment” pattern. Scientists from the U.S...