Publications

Dauphin Island is a barrier island located in the northern Gulf of Mexico and serves as the only barrier island providing protection to much of the State of Alabama’s coastal natural resources. The ecosystem spans over 3,500 acres of barrier island habitat including, beach, dune, overwash fans, intertidal wetlands, maritime forest and freshwater ponds. In addition, Dauphin Island...

The shallow and Memphis aquifers in Shelby County, Tennessee, are valuable natural resources that are used for domestic, public-supply, and agricultural water use. The Memphis aquifer is the primary source for public supply in West Tennessee and provides 170 to 175 million gallons of water per day for more than 900,000 people (Robinson, 2018). The shallow aquifer includes the unconfined...

Urban growth and climate change together complicate planning efforts meant to adapt to increasingly scarce water supplies. Several studies have independently examined the impacts of urban planning and climate change on water demand, but little attention has been given to their combined impact. Here we forecast urban water demand using a Geographically Weighted Regression model informed...

In an eastern-Pacific coral assemblage at Devil’s Crown, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, two coral species, Psammocora stellata and Cycloseris (Diaseris) distorta, form dense populations of unattached colonies on sand and rubble substrata. In the Galápagos, living C. (D.) distorta is found only at this single site, whereas populations of P. stellata are found throughout the archipelago. Six...

In highly mobile philopatric species, defining the scale of natal homing is fundamental to characterizing population dynamics and effectively managing distinct populations. Genetic tools have provided evidence of regional natal philopatry in marine turtles, but extensive sharing of maternally inherited mitochondrial control region (CR) haplotypes within regions (

Understanding trends in abundance is important to fisheries conservation, but techniques for estimating streamwide abundance of cryptic fishes with strong habitat–abundance relationships are not well established and need further development. We developed techniques for addressing this need using the Harlequin Darter Etheostoma histrio, a small, cryptic freshwater fish associated with...

Decades of research has concluded that the percent of impervious surface cover in a watershed is strongly linked to negative impacts on urban stream health. Recently, there has been a push by municipalities to offset these effects by installing structural stormwater control measures (SCMs), which are landscape features designed to retain and reduce runoff to mitigate the effects of...

Digital geospatial flood inundation mapping can be a powerful tool for flood risk management. Flood preparedness, communication, warning, response and mitigation can be enhanced by flood inundation mapping that shows floodwater extent and depth over the land surface. Flood inundation maps that accurately reflect observed and forecasted hydrodynamic conditions enable officials to make...

We report discovery of an established population of the Asian swamp eel Amphipnous cuchia (Hamilton, 1822) in Bayou St. John, an urban waterway in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. This fish, commonly referred to as cuchia (kuchia), is a member of the family Synbranchidae and is native to southern and southeastern Asia. Recently-used synonyms include Monopterus cuchia and Ophichthys cuchia...

To improve flood-frequency estimates at rural streams in Alabama, annual exceedance probability flows at gaged locations and regional regression equations used to estimate annual exceedance probability flows at ungaged locations were developed by using current geospatial data, new analytical methods, and annual peak-flow data through September 2015 at 242 streamgages in Alabama and...

Anthropogenic environmental change has increased coral reef disturbance regimes in recent decades, altering the structure and function of many coral reefs globally. In this study, we used coral community survey data collected from 1996 to 2015 to evaluate coral calcification capacity (CCC) dynamics with respect to recorded pulse disturbances for 121 reef sites in the Main Hawaiian...

Snakehead fishes (family Channidae) are among the most maligned aquatic invasive species in the USA and some other countries where they have been introduced outside of their native range in Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, snakeheads continue to be widely exploited in the live‐food trade in aquaculture and wild‐capture fisheries, are highly sought by anglers, and are also popular in the...