Publications

Effective resource management depends on our ability to partition diversity into biologically meaningful units. Recent evolutionary divergence, however, can often lead to ambiguity in morphological and genetic differentiation, complicating the delineation of valid conservation units. Such is the case with the "coregonine problem," where recent postglacial radiations of coregonines into...

Spawning movements and the factors affecting those movements are often of interest to fisheries managers and biologists. The objective of this study was to examine the influence of environmental factors on the movements of an adfluvial Rainbow Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss population in the Black Hills, South Dakota. Three unique strains of hatchery-reared Rainbow Trout and resident Rainbow...

Dams can alter the chemical and physical conditions of downstream environments by increasing stream temperatures, altering nutrient limitation, reducing flow variability, and reducing fine sediment deposition. However, little is known about how fundamental stream ecosystem processes like productivity and respiration respond to dams. Nutrient diffusing substrates were installed in three...

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...