Publications

Despite its great distance from productive shelf-edge habitat, the inner shelf area of the Bering Sea, from St. Lawrence Island to the Bering Strait, supports a surprisingly large number (>5 million) of seabirds during summer, mostly small plantivorous auklets (65%) and large piscivorous murres (19%) and kittiwakes (5%). This paradox of seabird biogeography is explained by the Anadyr...

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) give birth to and nurture their young in dens of ice and snow. During 1999-2001, we measured the structure of 22 dens on the coastal plain of northern Alaska after polar bear families had evacuated their dens in the spring. During the summers of 2001 and 2002, we revisited the sites of 42 maternal and autumn exploratory dens and recorded characteristics of...

Descriptions of the mineral occurrences shown on the accompanying figure follow. See U.S. Geological Survey (1996) for a description of the information content of each field in the records. The data presented here are maintained as part of a statewide database on mines, prospects and mineral occurrences throughout Alaska.

Radio telemetry was used to identify and map sockeye salmon spawning habitats in glacially influenced Lake Clark, Kvichak River watershed, Alaska. Two hundred eighty-two adult sockeye salmon were radio tagged and tracked to spawning grounds. Thirty-five spawning areas were identified, including 18 previously unidentified. Comparison of radio telemetry data with past aerial population...

Seven species of pigeons and doves were cultured for yeasts in the upper digestive tract. The following list gives the isolation rate for each columbid species and the yeasts cultured from them: feral pigeon Columba Livia (Gmelin) 95% -Candida albicans (Robin) Berkhout, C. tropicalis (Castellani) Berkhout, C. krusei (Cast.) Berkhout, C. guilliermondii (Cast.) Langeron et Guerra...

No abstract available.

Monitoring protocols are detailed study plans that explain how data are to be collected, managed, analyzed, and reported, and are a key component of quality assurance for natural resource monitoring programs. Protocols are necessary to ensure that changes detected by monitoring actually are occurring in nature and not simply a result of measurements taken by different people or in...

Radiotelemetry was used to document population structure in adult rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss from the Alagnak River, southwest Alaska. Rainbow trout (N = 134) longer than 440 mm were implanted with radio transmitters and tracked for varying periods from July 1997 to April 1999. Fifty-eight radio-tagged fish were tracked for sufficient duration (at least 11 months) to allow...

Pop-up archival transmitting (PAT) tags provide a fisheries-independent method of collecting environmental preference data (depth and ambient water temperature) and migration distance. In this study, we evaluate the use of pop-up archival transmitting tags as a method to investigate demersal fish. We report the results from eight pop-up archival transmitting tagged Pacific halibut...

Around the world, a great deal of effort is expended each year to estimate the sizes of wild animal populations. Unfortunately, population size has proven to be one of the most intractable parameters to estimate. The capture-recapture estimation models most commonly used (of the Jolly-Seber type) are complicated and require numerous, sometimes questionable, assumptions. The derived...

Sea otters and harlequin ducks have not fully recovered from the oil spill. This project will explore links between oil exposure and the lack of population recovery, with the intent of understanding constraints to recovery of these species and the nearshore environment. In FY 02, sea otter work will include aerial surveys of distribution and abundance and estimates of age-specific...

We developed photographic techniques to characterize coarse (>2-mm) and fine (≤2-mm) streambed particle sizes in 12 streams in Anchorage, Alaska. Results were compared with current sampling techniques to assess which provided greater sampling efficiency and accuracy. The streams sampled were wadeable and contained gravel—cobble streambeds. Gradients ranged from about 5% at the upstream...