Publications

Understanding how different life history stages are impacted by extreme or stochastic environmental variation is critical for predicting and modeling organism population dynamics. This project examined recruitment, growth, and mortality of seed (25–75 mm) and market (>75 mm) sized oysters along a salinity gradient over two years in Breton Sound, LA. In April 2010, management responses to...

Animal movement across the landscape plays a critical role in the ecology of infectious wildlife diseases. Dispersing animals can spread pathogens between infected areas and naïve populations. While tracking free-ranging animals over the geographic scales relevant to landscape-level disease management is challenging, landscape features that influence gene flow among wildlife populations...

Snakes within the genus Thamnophis (Gartersnakes and Ribbonsnakes) are often found in sympatry throughout their geographic distributions. Past work has indicated that some sympatric species within this genus may hybridize, but research of this nature is limited. We attempted to determine whether hybridization occurs between two Thamnophis species native to the upper midwestern United...

The success of natural resource management depends on monitoring, assessment and enforcement. In support of these efforts, reference points (RPs) are often viewed as critical values of management-relevant indicators. This paper considers RPs from the standpoint of objective-driven decision making in dynamic resource systems, guided by principles of structured decision making (SDM) and...

Our objective was to create a metric that would calculate the relative impact of common commercial agricultural practices on terrestrial vertebrate richness. We sought to define impacts in fields (including field borders) of the southeastern region’s commercial production of corn, wheat, soy, and cotton. The metric is intended to serve as an educational tool, allowing producers to see...

Protection of native aquatic plants is an important proenvironmental behavior, because plant loss coupled with nutrient loading can produce changes in lake ecosystems. Removal of aquatic plants by lakeshore property owners is a diffuse behavior that may lead to cumulative impacts on lake ecosystems. This class of behavior is challenging to manage because collective impacts are not...

There is a substantial amount of carbon stored in the permafrost soils of boreal forest ecosystems, where it is currently protected from decomposition. The surface organic horizons insulate the deeper soil from variations in atmospheric temperature. The removal of these insulating horizons through consumption by fire increases the vulnerability of permafrost to thaw, and the carbon...

This study compared patterns of δ15N and δ13C enrichment of pallid sturgeon Scaphirhynchus albus and shovelnose sturgeon S. platorynchus in the Missouri River, United States, to infer their trophic position in a large river system. We examined enrichment and energy flow for pallid sturgeon in three segments of the Missouri River (Montana/North Dakota, Nebraska/South Dakota, and Nebraska...

There is growing concern over the effects of increased salinization on freshwater organisms, which are largely unknown for unionid mussels. Adult and larval Elliptio complanata were exposed to low-level salt concentrations to determine the effects on mussel survival, physiology, and reproduction. Adults were exposed to salt concentrations of 0 parts per thousand (ppt), 2 ppt, 4 ppt, and...

Ecosystems around the world are already threatened by land-use and land-cover change, extraction of natural resources, biological disturbances, and pollution. These environmental stressors have been the primary source of ecosystem degradation to date, and climate change is now exacerbating some of their effects. Ecosystems already under stress are likely to have more rapid and acute...

Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) (MPB) outbreaks are increasingly prevalent in western North America, causing considerable ecological change in pine (Pinus spp.) forests with important implications for wildlife. We reviewed studies examining wildlife responses to MPB outbreaks and postoutbreak salvage logging to inform forest management and guide future research. Our review...

Analyses of animal resource selection functions (RSF) using data collected from relocations of individuals via remote telemetry devices have become commonplace. Increasing technological advances, however, have produced statistical challenges in analysing such highly autocorrelated data. Weighted distribution methods have been proposed for analysing RSFs with telemetry data. However, they...