Publications

Riparian trees and their annual growth rings can be used to reconstruct drought histories related to streamflow. Because the death of individual trees reduces competition for survivors, however, tree-ring chronologies based only on surviving trees may underestimate drought impacts. This problem can be addressed by calculating productivity at the stand scale to account for tree mortality...

Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) geoform, substrate, and biotic component geographic information system (GIS) products were developed for the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (U.S. EEZ) of south-central California in the region of Santa Lucia Bank motivated by interest in development of offshore wind-energy capacity and infrastructure. The Bureau of Ocean Energy...

Although bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) and tailed frogs (Ascaphus montanus) have co-existed in forested Pacific Northwest streams for millennia, these iconic cold-water specialists are experiencing rapid environmental change caused by a warming climate and enhanced wildfire activity. Our goal was to inform future conservation by examining the habitat associations of each species...

Applications of genetic-based estimates of population size are expanding, especially for species for which traditional demographic estimation methods are intractable due to the rarity of adult encounters. Estimates of breeding population size (NS) are particularly amenable to genetic-based approaches as the parameter can be estimated using pedigrees reconstructed from genetic data...

Decision-makers in inland fisheries management must balance ecologically and socially palatable objectives for ecosystem services within financial or physical constraints. Climate change has transformed the potential range of ecosystem services available. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework offers a foundation for responding to climate-induced ecosystem modification; however...

1. Large-scale, long-term biodiversity monitoring is essential to conservation, land management, and identifying threats to biodiversity. However, multispecies surveys are prone to various types of observation error, including false positive/negative detection, and misclassification, where a species is thought to have been encountered but not correctly identified. Previous methods assume...

Prairie dogs in the western United States experience periodic epizootics of plague, caused by the flea-borne bacterial pathogen Yersinia pestis. An early study indicated that Oropsylla hirsuta (Baker), often the most abundant prairie dog flea vector of plague, seldom transmits Y. pestis by the classic blocked flea mechanism. More recently, an alternative early-phase mode of transmission...

Iron mineral transformations occurring in hydrocarbon-contaminated sites are linked to the biodegradation of the hydrocarbons. At a hydrocarbon-contaminated site near Bemidji, Minnesota, USA, measurements of magnetic susceptibility (MS) are useful for monitoring the natural attenuation of hydrocarbons related to iron cycling. However, a transient MS, previously observed at the site...

The environmental factors controlling soil biodiversity along resource gradients remain poorly understood in wet tropical ecosystems. Aboveground biodiversity is expected to be driven by changes in nutrient availability in these ecosystems, however, much less is known about the importance of nutrient availability in driving soil biodiversity. Here, we combined a cross-continental soil...

Two new joint gravity-magnetic models in northern Coachella Valley provide additional evidence for a steep northeast dip of the Mission Creek strand of the southern San Andreas fault (southern California, USA). Gravity modeling indicates a steep northeast dip of the Banning fault in the upper 1–2 km in northern Coachella Valley. The Mission Creek strand and its continuation to the...

The first author, Gary S. Fuis, conducted this mapping in the summer of 1967 in partial fulfillment of the entry requirements into the Ph.D program of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. The area mapped lies wholly within the Fort Rock Ranch, a private ranch spanning ~50 square miles in Mohave and Yavapai Counties...

Many introduced plants pose invasion risks globally and threaten the biodiversity of native ecosystems. Such non-native plants can become invasive when they have advantages over native plants, such as having fewer natural enemies. Invasive plants often have the ability to alter ecosystem properties after they have become established, which can make it difficult to eliminate the invasive...