Publications

The hydrological effects of climate change are documented in many regions; however, climate-driven impacts to the source and transport of river nutrients remain poorly understood. Understanding the factors controlling nutrient dynamics across river systems is critical to preserve ecosystem function yet challenging given the complexity of landscape and climate interactions. Here, we...

Conservation is increasingly focused on preventing losses in species’ populations before they occur. Tracking changes in demographic parameters that can impact a population’s resilience in response to drivers of global change can support early conservation efforts. We assessed trends in population productivity (late summer juveniles per 100 females) relative to drivers of global change...

The effects of agriculture and flood control practices accrued over more than a century have impaired aquatic habitats and their fish communities in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the historic floodplain of the Lower Mississippi River prior to leveeing. As a first step to conservation planning and adaptive management, we developed and tested a conceptual model of how changes to this...

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a highly contagious, fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by infectious prions (PrPCWD) affecting wild and captive cervids. Although experimental feeding studies have demonstrated prions in feces of crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos), coyotes (Canis latrans), and cougars (Puma concolor), the role of scavengers and predators in CWD epidemiology remains poorly

Objective Both electronic tags (e.g., acoustic and radio transmitters) and conventional external tags are used to evaluate movement and population dynamics of fish. External tags are also sometimes used to facilitate the recovery of internal electronic tags or other instrumentation because healing can make it difficult to identify fish with internal tags based on appearance alone. With...

U.S. forests, particularly in the eastern states, provide an important offset to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some have proposed that forest-based natural climate solutions can be strengthened via a number of strategies, including increases in the production of forest biomass energy. We used output from a forest dynamics model (SORTIE-ND) in combination with a GHG accounting tool...

There is a continuing need to assess the state (distribution and abundance) of furbearer populations throughout North America for state and provincial agencies to properly manage furbearers. With an expanding human population and continued changes in land-use practices, habitat loss and fragmentation, declines in natural prey, increases in disease transmission from domestic species, and...

An important part of infectious disease management is predicting factors that influence disease outbreaks, such as R, the number of secondary infections arising from an infected individual. Estimating R is particularly challenging for environmentally transmitted pathogens given time lags between cases and subsequent infections. Here, we calculated R for Bacillus anthracis infections...

Unoccupied aerial systems (UASs) may provide cheaper, safer, and more accurate and precise alternatives to traditional waterfowl survey techniques while also reducing disturbance to waterfowl. We evaluated availability and perception bias based on machine-learning-based non-breeding waterfowl count estimates derived from aerial imagery collected using a DJI Mavic Pro 2 on Missouri...

Stream restoration programs employ beaver-related restoration techniques, including beaver translocations and installation of beaver dam analogs (BDA), to create complex in-stream habitat. We investigated whether BDA installations improved the probability of translocated beavers surviving and colonizing a section of a degraded desert river. We translocated beavers fitted with tracking...

Understanding the role of recruitment in population dynamics of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) is important for management. In the central Appalachian Mountains, deer are part of a largely forested ecosystem that supports 3 carnivore species thought to be capable of influencing white-tailed deer recruitment: black bears (Urus americanus), coyotes (Canis latrans), and bobcats...

Geographical distributions of waterfowl exhibit annual variation in response to spatiotemporal variation in weather conditions, habitat availability, and other factors. Continuing changes in climate and land use could lead to persistent shifts of waterfowl distributions, potentially causing a mismatch with habitat conservation planning, wetland restoration efforts, and harvest management...