Publications

Advances in underwater camera technology provide an affordable means to quantify the environmental conditions under which fish spawn. This information is important for investigating spawning ecology, managing habitat, or providing information for captive breeding programs. We deployed 12 modified security cameras underwater to identify environmental conditions related to the spawning...

We designed a flexible protocol for monitoring fish species richness in nonwadeable rivers. Nine sites were sampled seasonally with six gears in two physiographic regions in Missouri (USA). Using resampling procedures and mixed-effects modeling, we quantified richness and compositional overlap among gears, identified efficient gear combinations, and evaluated protocol performance across...

Invasive species represent a threat to aquatic ecosystems globally; however, impacts can be heterogenous across systems. Documented impacts of invasive zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) and spiny water fleas (Bythotrephes cederströmii; hereafter Bythotrephes) on native fishes are variable and context dependent across locations and time periods. Here, we use a hierarchical Bayesian...

The spatial organization of fishes in a river system was investigated to evaluate the longitudinal distribution of uncommon species. It was anticipated that overall richness of the fish community would increase in a downstream direction together with habitat extent, but that more uncommon species would occur upstream owing to greater heterogeneity among sites.Fish were collected between...

Resilience thinking has generated much interest among scientific communities, yet most resilience concepts have not materialized into management applications. We believe that using resilience concepts to characterize systems and the social and ecological processes affecting them is a way to integrate resilience into better management decisions. This situation is exemplified by inland...

While we have a good understanding in many systems of the effects of single variable changes on organisms, we understand far less about how variables act in concert to affect living systems, where interactions among variables can lead to unanticipated results. We used mixed-effect models to evaluate the effects of multiple variables that we expected to play a role in the early...

Aim Physiological tolerances and biotic interactions along habitat gradients are thought to influence species occurrence. Distributional differences caused by such forces are particularly noticeable on tropical mountains, where high species turnover along elevational gradients occurs over relatively short distances and elevational distributions of particular species can shift among...

Nest survival of ducks is partially a function of the spatiotemporal characteristics of the site at which a bird chooses to nest. Nest survival is also a fundamental component of population growth in waterfowl but is relatively unstudied for cinnamon teal (Spatula cyanoptera). We investigated cinnamon teal nest survival in a managed wetland complex in southern Colorado, USA, and assessed...

Yellow perch, Perca flavescens, is an ecologically and economically important species native to a large portion of the northern United States and southern Canada and is also a promising candidate species for aquaculture. However, no yellow perch reference genome has been available to facilitate improvements in both fisheries and aquaculture management practices. By combining Oxford...

Grass Carp Ctenopharyngodon idella have been intentionally stocked for aquatic vegetation control across the Midwestern United States for several decades. During the 1970s, escapement of Grass Carp into the Missouri River facilitated their naturalization into much of the Mississippi River basin, including the Upper Mississippi River. Lock and Dam 19 (LD19) in Keokuk, Iowa, is a high-head...

Coastal wetlands of the Caribbean have been greatly reduced in area and quality, and information on wildlife responses to management is lacking. We applied wetland management practices (disking, control of water levels) in a site historically disturbed by Saccharum spp. (sugarcane) cultivation at the Humacao Nature Reserve, southeastern Puerto Rico, and evaluated avian community response...

Management frequently creates system conditions that poorly mimic the conditions of a desirable self-organizing regime. Such management is ubiquitous across complex systems of people and nature and will likely intensify as these systems face rapid change. However, it is highly uncertain whether the costs (unintended consequences, including negative side effects) of management but also...