Publications

Freshwater species are increasingly threatened by climate change, yet our ability to assess their vulnerability remains incomplete. Typically, climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) evaluate three components: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity, defined as the ability of a species to adjust to changing conditions, provides critical insight into how...

Land use change in prairie ecosystems is pervasive. Prairie obligate species may be affected by these changes, though many carnivore-specific examples are unknown. We used 3 years (2018–2020) of camera-trap (n = 381) data from Kansas, USA, to assess multiscale effects of landscape composition on habitat use by American badgers (badger, Taxidea taxus). We predicted that site occupancy and

Conifer forests have experienced widespread disturbance following the infestation of bark beetles (Dendroctonus spp.). Tree mortality and resulting canopy loss have altered forest composition in ways that could affect moose (Alces alces), including potential benefits from increased understory forage and drawbacks through the loss of refuge from heat and deep snow. We examined the...

Collaborative governance structures (CGS) have been increasingly adopted to address joint-jurisdictional management challenges. While the establishment of CGSs has been widely studied, their practical development has remained a conspicuous gap. CGSs are variable systems with several developmental stages (activation, collectivity, and institutionalization) which eventually lead to...

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is an always-fatal disease infecting wild cervids globally. Ecologically and economically important, CWD presents a challenge for managing white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). We built an agent-based model to simulate CWD transmission and assess potential management actions that could slow disease spread: PAOvCWD. We developed PAOvCWD using contact...

As human activities and wildlife increasingly overlap in the Anthropocene, conventional conservation paradigms focused on land-sparing are shifting toward strategies that support human–wildlife coexistence. However, achieving sustainable coexistence is often hindered by a limited understanding of the dynamic social–ecological processes that drive integrated human–wildlife systems. This...

Objective Anadromous fisheries can affect stocks with differing management objectives. Understanding the effects of fisheries on individual stocks by quantifying final dispositions, including escapement and mortalities, is important for sustainable fishery management. Our objectives were to extend an existing management model that is used to evaluate final stock dispositions to estimate...

Objective Body condition is often used as a surrogate of individual fitness in fisheries ecology and management, but empirical data demonstrating this linkage are few. Here, we investigated whether weight at length (i.e., body condition) explained individual variation in survival.Methods We conducted a mark–recapture survey of three native fishes subseasonally (every 2 months) over 28...

BACKGROUND

Objective Understanding whether fishes quickly respond to shifting temperatures and flows, especially as they pass through river reaches that may be thermally unsuitable, may help to prioritize climate-informed management strategies.Methods Here, we use 15 years of daily fish passage data (2005–2020) from the Leaburg Dam on the McKenzie River, Oregon, USA, with water temperatures and...

Grasslands are an imperiled ecosystem, and grassland bird abundance is declining across North America. One of the strongest drivers for these declines is woody plant encroachment of grasslands. In the Great Plains and Sagebrush biomes of North America, spatial covariance—a remote-sensing metric for tracking boundaries between vegetation types—is emerging as a new method to identify and...

The flow regime is considered a ‘master variable’ in riverine ecology because it directly influences stream geomorphology and biological communities. However, other environmental and anthropogenic factors have direct and synergistic effects with flow on fish diversity, complicating estimates of the flow regime's true importance. Moreover, most flow-ecology studies focus only on taxonomic...