Publications

Larval fish ecology is poorly characterized because sampling is difficult and tools for phenotypically identifying larvae are poorly developed. While DNA barcoding can help address the latter problem, ‘universal’ primers do not work for all fish species. The Roanoke River in the southeastern United States includes seven darters (Family Percide: Tribe Etheostomatini). We made 393...

Increasing frequency and severity of wildfire may jeopardize persistence of large tracts of late seral forest, raising concerns over population viability of forest-dependent species like the Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis). We tracked 20 adult Northern Goshawks with GPS loggers over 4 years to investigate roosting (nocturnal) and foraging (diurnal) habitat selection in a...

Faced with limitations in data availability, funding, and time constraints, ecologists are often tasked with making predictions beyond the range of their data. In ecological studies, it is not always obvious when and where extrapolation occurs because of the multivariate nature of the data. Previous work on identifying extrapolation has focused on univariate response data, but these...

The American woodcock (Scolopax minor; hereafter, woodcock) Singing-Ground Survey (SGS) was developed to inform management decisions by monitoring changes in the relative abundance of woodcock. The timing of the designated survey windows was designed to count resident woodcock while minimizing counting of migrating woodcock. Since the implementation of the SGS in 1968, concerns over...

The American Woodcock (Scolopax minor; hereafter, woodcock) Singing-ground Survey (SGS) is conducted annually during the woodcock breeding season, and survey points along survey routes are set 0.4 mile (0.65 km) apart to avoid counting individual birds from >1 listening location. The effective area surveyed (EAS) at a listening point is not known, and may vary as a function of land-cover...

The Singing-ground Survey (SGS) was designed to exploit the conspicuous breeding-season display of male American woodcock (Scolopax minor; hereafter, woodcock) to monitor these otherwise inconspicuous birds. The SGS was standardized in 1968 and has since been conducted annually to derive an index of abundance and population trend. Counts of singing male woodcock on the SGS have generally...

Use of dogs has increased for multiple wildlife research purposes ranging from carnivore scat detection to estimation of reptile abundance. Use of dogs is not particularly novel for upland gamebird biologists, and pointing dogs have been long considered an important research tool. However, recent advances in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology and the development of hierarchical...

No abstract available.

Multivariate compositional count data arise in many applications including ecology, microbiology, genetics and paleoclimate. A frequent question in the analysis of multivariate compositional count data is what underlying values of a covariate(s) give rise to the observed composition. Learning the relationship between covariates and the compositional count allows for inverse prediction of

Common Carp Cyprinus carpio is a nonnative species that often has deleterious effects on aquatic systems. As such, there is interest in suppressing nonnative Common Carp populations in areas where humans have introduced them. The objectives of this study were to 1) provide insight on efficient techniques for capturing Common Carp, 2) describe their population demographics and dynamics, 3...

Understanding the impacts of landscape change on species distributions can help inform decision-making and conservation planning. Unfortunately, empirical data that span large spatial extents across multiple taxa are limited. In this study, we used expert elicitation techniques to develop species distribution models (SDMs) for harvested wildlife species (n = 10) in the New England region...

Ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus; i.e., pheasant) hunting participation is declining across North America, reflecting a larger downward trend in American hunting participation and threatening benefits to grassland conservation and rural economies. To stabilize and expand the pheasant hunting population, we must first identify factors that influence pheasant hunter participation...