Publications

Saline tidal wetlands are important sites of carbon sequestration and produce negligible methane (CH4) emissions due to regular inundation with sulfate-rich seawater. Yet, widespread management of coastal hydrology has restricted tidal exchange in vast areas of coastal wetlands. These ecosystems often undergo impoundment and freshening, which in turn cause vegetation shifts like invasion...

Climate change and anthropogenic activities are altering the body sizes of fishes, yet our understanding of factors influencing body size for many taxa remains incomplete. We evaluated the relationships between climate, environmental, and landscape attributes and the body size of different taxa of freshwater trout (Salmonidae) in the USA. Hierarchical spatial modeling across a gradient...

Human-induced abiotic global environmental changes (GECs) and the spread of nonnative invasive species are rapidly altering ecosystems. Understanding the relative and interactive effects of invasion and GECs is critical for informing ecosystem adaptation and management, but this information has not been synthesized. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate effects of invasions, GECs...

Sleeper species are non-native species that are established in a region and could become invasive as climate change makes conditions more favorable for many non-native species. Before we can manage potential sleepers, we must first know their identity. We analyzed non-native, established plants in the Northeast United States (CT, MA, ME, NH, NY, RI, VT) using the Environmental Impact

1. Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) are now widely used to survey communities of species. These surveys generate spatially and temporally replicated counts of unmarked animals, but such data typically include false negatives and misclassified detections, both of which may vary across sites in proportion to abundance. These data challenges can bias estimates of occupancy, and the typical...

A study was conducted to compile and evaluate data used to identify groundwater sources that are under the direct influence of surface water (GUDI) in Pennsylvania. In the early 1990s, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) implemented the Surface Water Identification Protocol (SWIP) for the identification of GUDI sources. Since the establishment of the SWIP...

Chemically intensive crop production depletes wildlife food resources, hinders animal development, health, survival, and reproduction, and it suppresses wildlife immune systems, facilitating emergence of infectious diseases with excessive mortality rates. Gut microbiota is crucial for wildlife's response to environmental stressors. Its composition and functionality are sensitive to diet...

Rates of shoreline change have been updated for the open-ocean sandy coastlines of Georgia and Florida as part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal Change Hazards programmatic focus. This work was formerly within the National Assessment of Shoreline Change project. Shorelines were compiled from the original report published in 2005, recent update reports, and additional light...

This work experimentally explores porosity, compressibility, and the ratio of horizontal to vertical effective stress (K0) in hydrate-bearing sandy silts from Green Canyon Block 955 in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico. The samples have an in situ porosity of 0.38 to 0.40 and a hydrate saturation of more than 80%. The hydrate-bearing sediments are stiffer than the equivalent hydrate-free...

Permeability is one of the most crucial properties governing fluid flow in methane hydrate reservoirs. This paper presents a comprehensive permeability analysis of hydrate-bearing sandy silt pressure-cored from Green Canyon Block 955 (GC 955) in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico. We developed an experimental protocol to systematically characterize the transport and petrophysical properties...

Massive volumes of gas are sequestered within gas hydrate in subsurface marine sediments in the Gulf of Mexico. Methane associated with gas hydrate is a potentially important economic resource and a significant reservoir of carbon within the global carbon cycle. Nevertheless, uncertainties remain about the genetic source (e.g., microbial, thermogenic) and possible migration history of...

New and previously published stratigraphic data define Holocene to present sediment storage time scales for Mid-Atlantic river corridors. Empirical distributions of deposit ages and thicknesses were randomly sampled to create synthetic age-depth records. Deposits predating European settlement accumulated at a (median) rate of 0.06 cm yr−1, range from ∼18,000 to 225 yr old, and represent...