Publications

All animals are host to a multitude of microorganisms that are essential to the animal’s health. Host-associated microbes have been shown to defend against potential pathogens, provide essential nutrients, interact with the host’s immune system, and even regulate mood. However, it can be difficult to preserve and obtain nucleic acids from some host-associated microbiomes, making studying...

The conservation of native insect pollinators is hampered by a lack of information about environmental factors influencing pollinator communities. We investigated how insect pollinator communities, composed of bees (Hymenoptera), butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera), and flies (Diptera), are influenced by spatial and temporal aspects of the environment in sagebrush steppe shrublands. We...

Western North American sagebrush shrublands and steppe face accelerating risks from fire-driven feedback loops that transition these ecosystems into self-reinforcing states dominated by invasive annual grasses. In response, sagebrush conservation decision-making is increasingly done through the lens of resilience to fire and annual grass invasion resistance. Operationalizing resilience...

Strategic restoration of altered habitat is one method for addressing worldwide biodiversity declines. Within the sagebrush steppe of western North America, habitat degradation has been linked to declines in many species, making restoration a priority for managers; however, limited funding, spatiotemporal variation in restoration success, and the need to manage for diverse wildlife...

Barrier islands are dynamic environments that experience gradual change from waves, tides, and currents, and rapid change from extreme storms. These islands are expected to change drastically over the coming century due to accelerated sea-level rise and changes in frequency and intensity of storm events. The dynamic nature of barrier islands coupled with the importance of these...

A disconnect between scientific research and environmental management communities can be a detriment to both. In the case of Great Lakes coastal ecosystems, which are inherently complex and subject to uncertain effects of future climatic, environmental, and anthropogenic drivers, greater collaboration could be beneficial to their sustainability. We capture the challenges and...

For most of the scientific disciplines associated with coastal and estuarine research, workforce representation does not match the demographics of communities we serve, especially for Black, Hispanic or Latino, and Indigenous peoples. This essay provides an overview of this inequity and identifies how a scientific society can catalyze representational, structural, and interactional...

Cyclic climatic and glacial fluctuations of the Late Quaternary produced a dynamic biogeographic history for high latitudes. To refine our understanding of this history in northwestern North America, we explored geographic structure in a wide-ranging carnivore, the wolverine (Gulo gulo). We examined genetic variation in populations across mainland Alaska, coastal Southeast Alaska, and...

Sea-level rise is a threat to coastal ecosystems, which have important conservation and economic value. While marsh response to sea-level rise has been well characterized for perennially open estuaries, bar-built intermittently-closed estuaries and their sea-level rise response are seldom addressed in the literature – despite being common globally. We seek to advance the conceptual...

Fire and fuel management is a high priority in North American sagebrush ecosystems where the expansion of piñon and juniper trees and the invasion of nonnative annual grasses are altering fire regimes and resulting in loss of sagebrush species and habitat. We evaluated 10-yr effects of woody fuel treatments on sagebrush recruitment and plant functional group interactions using Sagebrush...

Methylmercury concentrations vary widely across geographic space and among habitat types, with marine and aquatic-feeding organisms typically exhibiting higher mercury concentrations than terrestrial-feeding organisms. However, there are few model organisms to directly compare mercury concentrations as a result of foraging in marine, estuarine, or terrestrial food webs. The ecological...

Altered climate, including weather extremes, can cause major shifts in vegetative recovery after disturbances. Predictive models that can identify the separate and combined temporal effects of disturbance and weather on plant communities and that are transferable among sites are needed to guide vulnerability assessments and management interventions. We asked how functional group...