Publications

Mississippi kites (Ictinia mississippiensis) have become an abundant raptor in many urban and exurban areas throughout the Southern Great Plains of the United States. Unfortunately, human–wildlife conflicts have resulted from this juxtaposition of suitable breeding areas for kites and areas that humans frequent, with some kites responding aggressively to humans near nests. To date, there...

No abstract available.

This chapter discusses an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project to understand the interactions of agriculture, climate, and water resources in the Central Great Plains as a coupled natural-human system. We focus on the Smoky Hills Watershed in Kansas, where we gathered socioeconomic, hydrological, and climatic data, along with ecological data on fish species. The project...

The development of a hydrologic foundation, essential for advancing our understanding of flow-ecology relationships, was developed using the high-resolution physics-based distributed rainfall–runoff model Vflo in a semi-arid region. We compared the accuracy and bias associated with flow metrics that were generated using Vflo, gauge data, and drainage area ratios at both a daily and...

Oyster reef living shorelines have been proposed as an effective alternative to traditional coastal defence structures (e.g. bulkheads, breakwaters), with the benefit that they may keep pace with sea‐level rise and provide co‐benefits, such as habitat provision. However, there remains uncertainty about the effectiveness of shoreline protection provided by oyster reefs, which limits their...

We examined flow alteration-ecology relationships in benthic macroinvertebrate, fish, and crayfish assemblages in Ozark Highland streams, USA, over two years with contrasting environmental conditions, a drought year (2012) and a flood year (2013). We hypothesized that: 1) there would be temporal variation in flow alteration-ecology relationships between the two years, 2) flow alteration...

Understanding the genetic mechanisms that facilitate adaptive radiation is an important component of evolutionary biology. Here, we genotyped 82 neutral SNPs, seven SNPs in islands of divergence identified in a previous study (island SNPs), and a region of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in 32 populations of sockeye salmon to investigate whether conserved genes and genomic...

Bycatch of Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) limits many trawl fisheries in Alaska and greatly concerns stakeholders from local communities and fisheries that rely on Pacific halibut. To reduce Pacific halibut mortality, trawlers in the Bering Sea that target flatfish have been developing expedited release procedures to sort Pacific halibut from catches earlier than current...

Migration is an effective behavioral strategy for prolonging access to seasonal resources and may be a resilient strategy for ungulates experiencing changing climatic conditions. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), elk are the primary ungulate, with approximately 20,000 individuals migrating to exploit seasonal gradients in forage while also avoiding energetically costly snow...

Occupancy models have become a valuable tool for estimating wildlife-habitat relationships and for predicting species distributions. Highly-mobile species often violate the assumption that sampling units are geographically closed shifting the probability of occupancy to be interpreted as the probability of use. We used occupancy models, in conjunction with noninvasive sampling, to...

Abstract: We assessed parentage within and among maternity colonies of the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis Troessart 1897) in north-central Kentucky from 2011–2013 to better understand colony social structure, formation, and membership dynamics. We intensively sampled colonies in close and remote (> 10 km) spatial proximity both before and after targeted day-roost removal...

Sex determination is the first step toward the establishment of phenotypic sex in most vertebrates. Aquatic poikilotherms such as teleost fishes exhibit a high diversity of sex-determination mechanisms and gonadal phenotypes that are remarkably plastic and responsive to a variety of environmental factors (e.g., water temperature, pH, salinity, photoperiod, population density). This...