Articles

Background Fuel monitoring data are essential to evaluate wildfire risk, plan management activities and evaluate fuel treatment effects. Terrestrial light detection and ranging (lidar) is a field-based 3D scanning technology with great potential to reduce labor-intensive field measurements and provide new depths of vegetation structure data. Aims To facilitate the integration of...

Diamondback terrapins, hereafter referred to as terrapins, are the only estuarine turtle species native to North America. However, terrapins are also occasionally found in marine habitats, such as seagrass beds, and yet little is known about how they use those marine habitats. We sampled epidermis from terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin macrospilota) inhabiting a seagrass-dominated coastal...

Understanding salt marsh resilience under increasing sea levels can inform for management decisions. We compared temporal projections from various wetland process-based models and a geospatially derived metric (i.e., marsh lifespan) to understand key considerations and uncertainties about salt marsh resilience when using these products for decision-making. The influences of lidar...

More than 60% of emerging infectious diseases of humans have a wildlife origin, and when these diseases spread through human populations to new geographical areas, there is a considerable risk of spillback from humans to wildlife species. Spillback events can have severe consequences for wildlife populations, where the disease may cause morbidity and mortality, and human populations...

For at-risk species, understanding population vital rates is imperative for developing informed conservation strategies and population models. Managers often assume that species that are spatially distributed among patches of suitable habitat meet the criteria of a metapopulation. Metapopulation dynamics are determined not only by within-patch birth and death processes but also by...

Wildlife diseases can have substantial impacts on wildlife populations as well as on human and domestic animal health and well-being. Although many agencies and stakeholders share a goal of supporting wildlife health, reducing wildlife disease burden is complicated by a scarcity of effective interventions for wildlife, competition for funds, and conflicting priorities. As a result...

Alluvial aquifers can provide ecosystem services and drinking water, but much remains unknown about human effects on aquifer microbiomes. Therefore, we used amplicon sequencing and hydrochemical characterization to pair microbial communities with environmental conditions across 37 alluvial aquifer wells. The study region spanned eastern Iowa and southern Minnesota (USA) and contained a...

It is generally observed that magmatic sulfide ores have higher ratios of Pd/Pt than the mantle-like values of their parental magmas. This discrepancy has defied simple explanation because the partitioning behavior of both elements between sulfide and silicate liquids is very similar. Assimilation of sulfur- and carbon-rich country rocks by mafic and ultramafic magmas is considered a...

Volcano seismicity is often detected and classified based on its spectral properties. However, the wide variety of volcano seismic signals and increasing amounts of data make accurate, consistent, and efficient detection and classification challenging. Machine learning (ML) has proven very effective at detecting and classifying tectonic seismicity, particularly using Convolutional Neural...

Salt marshes play a critical role in providing economic and ecological benefits but are susceptible to shoreline erosion. Natural and nature-based features (NNBF), such as breakwater reefs, are often used to reduce shoreline exposure to wave action and provide biogenic benefits. However, waves and water level are also responsible for the sediment supply necessary for marsh accretion, a...

We use the Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast Epidemic Type Aftershock Sequence model, which is fully time-dependent in terms of including spatiotemporal clustering, to evaluate the effects of the Poisson assumption and declustering algorithms on statewide loss exceedance curves. The model is simulation based, meaning it produces synthetic catalogs that exhibit...

Efficient learning about disease dynamics in free-ranging wildlife systems can benefit from active surveillance that is standardized across different ecological contexts. For example, active surveillance that targets specific individuals and populations with standardized sampling across ecological contexts (landscape-scale targeted surveillance) is important for developing a mechanistic