Catherine Langtimm, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Monitoring the response of endangered and protected species to hydrological restoration is a major component of the adaptive management framework of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. The endangered Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) lives at the marine-freshwater interface in southwest Florida and is likely to be affected by hydrologic restoration. To provide...

Florida manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris) overwintering in the Ten Thousand Islands and western Everglades have no access to power plants or major artesian springs that provide warm-water refugia in other parts of Florida. Instead, hundreds of manatees aggregate at artificial canals, basins, and natural deep water sites that act as passive thermal refugia (PTR). Monitoring at two...

Predicting and monitoring restoration effects on Florida manatees, which are known to make extended movements, will be incomplete if modeling and monitoring are limited to the smaller areas defined by the various res-toration components. U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) efforts, thus far, have focused on (1) collecting manatee movement data throughout the Ten Thousand Islands (TTI) region...

Deviations from model assumptions in the application of capture–recapture models to real life situations can introduce unknown bias. Understanding the type and magnitude of bias under these conditions is important to interpreting model results. In a robust design analysis of long-term photo-documented sighting histories of the endangered Florida manatee, I found high survival rates, high...

The Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) is an endangered marine mammal endemic to the southeastern United States. The primary threats to manatee populations are collisions with watercraft and the potential loss of warm-water refuges. For the purposes of listing, recovery, and regulation under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), an understanding of the relative effects of the...

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research on Florida manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris) from 1982 through 1998 identified lower apparent survival rates for adult manatees during years when Hurricane Elena (1985), the March "Storm of the Century"(1993), and Hurricane Opal (1995) hit the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Although our analysis showed that a significant number of our...