Publications

The Puget Sound basin encompasses the 13,700-square-mile area that drains to the Puget Sound and the adjacent marine waters of Washington State. Well more than 4 million people live within the basin, with numbers continuing to increase, who rely on the basin’s natural resources including groundwater. The Puget Sound Partnership was created by a Washington State statute to implement a...

The entire Lower Fox River and inner bay of Green Bay, in northeastern Wisconsin, have been listed as impaired by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) for low dissolved oxygen and degraded habitat, with total phosphorus (TP) and total suspended solids (TSS) concentrations listed as the likely causes of these impairments. To restore the Fox River and Green Bay, total...

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed sea that borders the USA and Mexico and covers approximately 1.5 million square kilometers. The northern Gulf is topographically complex and is a rich source of oil and gas deposits, which has led to a great deal of research on benthic ecosystems from the coastal zone to the deep sea. While not fully explored, the distribution of cold seeps and deep...

Landsat 9 (L9) was launched on 27 September 2021. This spacecraft contained two instruments, the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) and Thermal Infrared Sensor-2 (TIRS-2), that allow for a continuation of the Landsat program and the mission to acquire multi-spectral observations of the globe on a moderate scale. Following a period of commissioning, during which time the spacecraft and...

With new motivation to increase the proportion of energy demands met by zero-carbon sources, there is a greater focus on efforts to assess and mitigate the impacts of renewable energy development on sensitive ecosystems and wildlife, of which birds are of particular interest. One challenge for researchers, due in part to a lack of appropriate tools, has been estimating the effects from...

The protection and management of water resources continues to be challenged by multiple and ongoing factors such as shifts in demographic, social, economic, and public health requirements. Physical limitations placed on access to potable supplies include natural and human-caused factors such as aquifer depletion, aging infrastructure, saltwater intrusion, floods, and drought. These...

Hybrid Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (KGML) models, which are deep learning models that utilize scientific theory and process-based model simulations, have shown improved performance over their process-based counterparts for the simulation of water temperature and hydrodynamics. We highlight the modular compositional learning (MCL) methodology as a novel design choice for the...

Although Big Oaks NWR encompasses much diversity in wildlife species, an up-to-date, detailed, and comprehensive map showing vegetation types was lacking. The creation of an updated vegetation map for Big Oaks NWR was approved in early 2019. Digital aerial imagery was collected on November 1, 2019 at a resolution of 0.15 meter per pixel using four spectral bands: red, green, blue, and...

Much of the US Southern Great Plains (SGP) continues to undergo intensive energy development that could affect the region's Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), yet the species' population status there is unknown. During 2011–2020, we used satellite telemetry to assess annual survival rates and causes of mortality among 40 preadult (

Conservation of the American Goshawk (Accipiter atricapillus; hereafter goshawk) has been contentious in relation to forest management. Higher quality goshawk nesting habitat is generally considered to consist of contiguous tracts of mature forest, due to goshawks' large home ranges, territoriality, and food requirements. The large trees of mature forest have the greatest economic value...

Movement is an important eco-evolutionary process that can shape population and ecosystem structure and function. Accordingly, a firm understanding of species movement ecology is often foundational to effective management and conservation. However, despite movement being an inherently individual-level behavior, there remains a tendency to describe dispersal and migration patterns using...

Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) have a Holarctic distribution, but some details of that overall distribution are poorly understood, including parts of the range in eastern North America. Recent studies in the region suggest that Golden Eagles may be more widely distributed than previously recognized. For species specific conservation efforts to be effective, an understanding of the...