Articles

We collected Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) eggshells from nests in the Tucson, Arizona, USA, area in the 1990s incidental to other activities and compared them to pre-DDT Cooper's Hawk eggshells (119 museum specimens from 14 states, 1894–1939) ranging from 0.284–0.402 mm (x̄= 0.348 mm, SD = 0.0243) and we also compared them to reported thicknesses found in the literature. We found...

Sleeper populations are established populations of introduced species whose population growth is limited by one or more abiotic or biotic conditions. Sleeper populations pose an invasion risk if a change in those limiting conditions, such as climate change, enables population growth and invasion. With thousands of established introduced species, it is critical that we identify and...

Advances in hierarchical modeling have improved estimation of ecological parameters from count data, especially those quantifying population abundance, distribution, and dynamics by explicitly accounting for observation processes, particularly incomplete detection. Even hierarchical models that account for incomplete detection, however, cannot compensate for data limitations stemming...

Coal mine drainage (CMD) and associated metal-rich precipitates have recently been proposed as unconventional sources of rare earth elements (REEs). However, the potential occurrence of radium (Ra), a known carcinogen, with the REE-bearing phases has not been investigated. We hypothesized that Ra may occur in solids that are precipitated from CMD as a “radiobarite” solid solution ((Ba,Sr...

Northern myotis Myotis septentrionalis are one of the bat species most affected by white-nose syndrome (WNS), and disease-induced declines may cause compounding effects when combined with other threats such as habitat loss and fragmentation. Recent evidence suggests that peripheral populations are persisting in post-WNS years; however, the environmental factors that influence the...

There is a growing recognition of a mental health crisis within the academic and research communities. Members of the planetary science community have called for healthier work environments to improve mental well-being. As a preliminary step towards improving workplace culture, we sought to determine whether the broader mental health crisis extends to planetary science and to assess the...

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is a species particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As the climate warms, polar bears will be forced to move to more suitable habitats which are likely to shrink, adapt to the new conditions, or decline in population size. However, the genomic diversity within and among all 19 subpopulations of polar bears, and therefore their adaptive...

Conservation translocations may be a useful tool for the restoration of declining freshwater invertebrates, but they are poorly represented in the literature. We conducted a before-after/control-impact (BACI) experiment to test the efficacy of conservation translocation for re-establishing abundant populations of the amphipod Gammarus lacustris, a declining species and wildlife food...

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal prion disease of cervids spreading across North America. More effective mitigation efforts may require expansion of the available toolkit to include new methods that provide earlier antemortem detection, higher throughput, and less expense than current immunohistochemistry (IHC) methods. The rectal mucosa near the rectoanal junction is a site of...

Drought is one of the key drivers of food insecurity in Afghanistan, which is among the most food insecure countries in the world. In this study, we build on previous research and seek to answer the central question: “What is the influence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on drought outlooks and agricultural yield outcome in Afghanistan, and how do these influences vary spatially?”...

An increase in seismic activity precedes most volcanic eruptions. Whereas event-based forecasting approaches have been successful, some eruptions remain unanticipated, resulting in casualties and damage. Our study leverages the recent advancements in ambient field seismology. We explore features extracted from continuous ambient fields using traditional methods, for example, peak ground...

Estimates of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) are valuable for effective monitoring and management of water resources. In areas that lack ground-based monitoring networks, remote sensing allows for accurate and consistent estimates of ETa across a broad scale—though each algorithm has limitations (i.e., ground-based validation, temporal consistency, spatial resolution). We developed an...