Publications

Maintaining intraspecific diversity is an important goal for fisheries conservation and recovery actions. While ecomorphological studies have demonstrated intraspecific diversity related to feeding or flow regime, there has been little assessment of such variation in regard to spawning habitat. We evaluated the relationship between individual morphology of Robust Redhorse and Notchlip...

Citizen engagement through urban forest tree committee volunteer service may aid in providing essential experience, ideas, and skills that support municipal tree management. Using semi-structured, research interviews with tree committee (TC) representatives from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this study addresses current knowledge gaps concerning the general composition...

Demographic assessments of nesting birds typically focus on failures due to nest predation or brood parasitism. Extreme weather events such as hailstorms, however, can also destroy eggs and injure or kill juvenile and adult birds at the nest. We documented the effects of a severe hailstorm on 3 species of sagebrush-associated songbirds: Sage Thrasher (Oreoscoptes montanus), Brewer's...

Understanding the spatial and temporal variability in life-history traits among populations is essential for the management of recreational fisheries. However, valuable freshwater recreational fish species often suffer from a lack of catch information. In this study, we demonstrated the use of an approach to estimate the spatial and temporal variability in growth and mortality in the...

The Chinese mystery snail, Bellamya chinensis (Gray, 1834) is a gastropod native to East Asia and is considered an invasive species in North America where its impacts on native species and ecosystems are not well understood. Scientific literature describing its biology and life history are sparse. Thermal tolerance limits, or the maximum and minimum temperature under which a species can...

A new species of crayfish, Cambarus loughmani sp. nov., is described from the preglacial Teays River Valley of Cabell, Kanawha, Lincoln, Mason, and Putnam counties, West Virginia. The species was previously considered to be part of the Cambarus dubius complex. Loughman et al. restricted C. dubius to an orange colour morph found in central and northern portions of the Allegheny Mountains...

Painted Buntings (Passerina ciris) have been declining in the southeastern United States since the 1970s. A recent demographic assessment highlighted the importance of estimating demographic parameters, which have received little attention to date. The dearth of information is troublesome because attempts to reverse declining trends require a better understanding of the relationship...

Gaussian processes are a fundamental statistical tool used in a wide range of applications. In the spatiotemporal setting, several families of covariance functions exist to accommodate a wide variety of dependence structures arising in different applications. These parametric families can be restrictive and are insufficient in some situations. In contrast, process convolutions represent...

We clarify relationships between conditional (CAR) and simultaneous (SAR) autoregressive models. We review the literature on this topic and find that it is mostly incomplete. Our main result is that a SAR model can be written as a unique CAR model, and while a CAR model can be written as a SAR model, it is not unique. In fact, we show how any multivariate Gaussian distribution on a...

Resource managers have been attempting to recover the kokanee (Oncorhynchus nerka) population in Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho for more than three decades using an annual stocking program and an experimental water-level management strategy. This study evaluated the effect of both management actions on kokanee recruitment. A bootstrap-based generalized Ricker model was used to test if wild...

Arctic tundra ecosystems have experienced unprecedented change associated with climate warming over recent decades. Across the Pan-Arctic, vegetation productivity and surface greenness have trended positively over the period of satellite observation. However, since 2011 these trends have slowed considerably, showing signs of browning in many regions. It is unclear what factors are...

Predation and predation risk can exert strong influences on the behavior of prey species. However, risk avoidance behaviors may vary among populations of the same species. We studied a population of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) near the southern edge of their range, in Pennsylvania. This population occupies different habitat types, experiences different environmental conditions, and...