Publications

Many management and conservation contexts can benefit from understanding relationships between species abundances, which can be used to improve predictions of species occurrence and abundance.We present conditional prediction as a tool to capture information about species abundances via residual covariance between species. From a fitted joint species distribution model, this framework...

Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), one of the most frequently detected per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) occurring in soil, surface water, and groundwater near sites contaminated with aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), has proven to be recalcitrant to many destructive remedies, including chemical oxidation. We investigated the potential to utilize microbially mediated reduction

The 30 November 2018, magnitude (Mw) 7.1 earthquake in Southcentral Alaska triggered substantial landslides, liquefaction, and ground cracking throughout the region, resulting in widespread geotechnical damage to buildings and infrastructure. Despite a challenging reconnaissance and remote-sensing environment, we constructed a detailed digital inventory of ground failure associated with...

Rapid changes in sea ice extent and changes in freshwater inputs from land are rapidly changing the nature of Arctic estuarine ecosystems. In the Beaufort Sea, these nearshore habitats are known for their high productivity and mix of marine resident and diadromous fishes that have great subsistence value for Indigenous communities. There is, however, a lack of information on the spatial...

Much of what is known about the effects of the 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake throughout the epicentral region can be attributed to meticulous field investigations by an individual with training in geology and engineering, Earle Sloan (Clendenin, 1926). In a recent study, Bilham and Hough (2024) undertook a detailed analysis of the effects of the earthquake on railroads in...

Soil seed banks help maintain species diversity through temporal storage effects and function as germination pools that can optimize fitness across varying environmental conditions. These characteristics promote the persistence of native plant communities, yet disturbances such as fire and associated invasions by non-native species can disrupt these reserves, fundamentally altering...

Oblique-slip along transform fault boundaries is often partitioned between a strike-slip system and thrust faults that accommodate contraction. However, topography along the Yakutat-North American transform (Fairweather fault), is asymmetric with low-terrain above active thrusts on the western, Yakutat side of the transform and high topography on the continental side with peaks >4500 m...

Managing aquatic ecosystems for people and nature can be improved by collaboration among scientists, managers, decision-makers, and other stakeholders. Many collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches have been developed to address the management of freshwater ecosystems; however, there are still barriers to overcome. We worked as part of a regional stakeholder group comprising...

Cropland fallowing is choosing not to plant a crop during a season when a crop is normally planted. It is an important component of many crop rotations and can improve soil moisture and health. Knowing which fields are fallow is critical to assess crop productivity and crop water productivity, needed for food security assessments. The annual spatial extent of cropland fallows is poorly...

Drylands impacted by energy development often require costly reclamation activities to reconstruct damaged soils and vegetation, yet little is known about the effectiveness of reclamation practices in promoting recovery of soil quality due to a lack of long-term and cross-site studies. Here, we examined paired on-pad and adjacent undisturbed off-pad soil properties over a 22-year...

Estimating an earthquake's magnitude and location may not be necessary to predict shaking in real time; instead, wavefield-based approaches predict shaking with few assumptions about the seismic source. Here, we introduce GRAph Prediction of Earthquake Shaking (GRAPES), a deep learning model trained to characterize and propagate earthquake shaking across a seismic network. We show that...

The use of wetlands as a treatment approach for nitrogen in runoff is a common practice in agroecosystems. However, nitrate is not the sole constituent present in agricultural runoff and other biologically active contaminants have the potential to affect nitrate removal efficiency. In this study, the impacts of the combined effects of four common veterinary antibiotics (chlortetracycline