Education:
Ph.D. - Environmental Resources and Policy, Southern Illinois University, December 2014
Dissertation: Impacts of climate and land use change on fish species distributions in the Central United States
M.S. - Biology, Kansas State University, August 2008
Thesis: Assessing threats to native fishes in the Lower Colorado River Basin
B.S. - Environmental Biology, University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, May 2006
Professional Experience:
2015 - present: Ecologist, U.S. Geological Survey, Upper Midwest Environmental Science Center (La Crosse, WI)
2014 - 2015: Post-doctoral Research Associate, University of Missouri (Columbia, MO)
2010 - 2014: Graduate Research Assistant, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale, IL)
2009 - 2010: GIS Specialist, South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks (Pierre, SD)
2009 - 2010: Biology Instructor, Lower Brule Community College (Lower Brule, SD)
2009: Fisheries Technician, U.S. Forest Service (Missoula, MT)
2008 - 2009: Anthony A. Lapham Fellow, American Rivers (Washington, D.C.)
2006 - 2008: Graduate Research Assistant, Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS)
Climate change has and is projected to continue to alter historical regimes of temperature, precipitation, and hydrology. To assess the vulnerability of climate change from a land management perspective and spatially identify where the most extreme changes are anticipated to occur, we worked in collaboration with land managers to develop a climate...
Delaney, John Thomas; Bouska, Kristen L.; Eash, Josh D; Heglund, Patricia J.; Allstadt, Andrew A Changes in species dominance may drive regime shifts because dominant biotic feedbacks reflect functional traits of a community. Changes in species dominance has been documented by a 25-year fish community dataset encompassing six reaches of the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Specifically, common carp (Cyprinus carpio) abundance has...
Bouska, Kristen L. Regime shifts –persistent changes in the structure and function of an ecosystem - are well-documented in many ecosystems but remain poorly understood in floodplain-river ecosystems. We apply a resilience perspective to large floodplain-river ecosystems by presenting three examples of plausible sets of alternate regimes that are relevant to natural...
Bouska, Kristen L.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; De Jager, Nathan R.; Drake, Deanne C.; Collins, Scott F.; Gibson-Reniemer, Caniel K.; Thomsen, Meredith A. The goal of this research framework is to outline research that would continue to improve our understanding of ecological resilience of the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) and inform management of the system for health and resilience. We provide a broad overview of recently completed and ongoing work that has been funded as a part of the...
Bouska, Kristen L. Large floodplain-river ecosystems are often highly modified to provide services that society desires, yet these modifications can limit an ecosystem’s ability to adapt to changing conditions. The adaptive capacity of an ecosystem, its general resilience, is a conceptual framework for considering how a system will respond to such changes. We sought...
Bouska, Kristen L.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; De Jager, Nathan R.; Van Appledorn, Molly; Rogala, James T. Land cover is an important determinant of aquatic habitat and is projected to shift with climate changes, yet climate-driven land cover changes are rarely factored into climate assessments. To quantify impacts and uncertainty of coupled climate and land cover change on warm-water fish species’ distributions, we used an ensemble model approach to...
Bouska, Kristen L.; Whitledge, Gregory W.; Lant, Christopher; Schoof, Justin
This report documents the development of quantitative measures (indicators) of ecosystem structure and function for use in a Habitat Needs Assessment (HNA) for the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS). HNAs are led periodically by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) Program, which is the primary habitat...
De Jager, Nathan R.; Rogala, James T.; Rohweder, Jason J.; Van Appledorn, Molly; Bouska, Kristen L.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; Jankowski, Kathi Jo Despite increased focus on their ecology and conservation, freshwater mussels remain one of the most imperiled groups of aquatic organisms. We documented current management actions, resources, and challenges in managing freshwater mussels in the United States through a survey of state natural resource agencies. Approximately 85% of surveyed states...
Bouska, Kristen L.; Rosenberger, Amanda E.; McMurray, Stephen E.; Lindner, Garth A.; Key, Kayla N. Functional composition of communities across scales is increasingly used to infer resilience of biotic communities to environmental change. To assess the relevance of these concepts to management of large rivers, analyses were applied to fish community data of the Upper Mississippi River. First, to evaluate whether there was evidence for...
Bouska, Kristen L. The Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS) is a large and complex floodplain river ecosystem that spans the jurisdictions of multiple state and federal agencies. In support of ongoing ecosystem restoration and management by this broad partnership, we are undertaking a resilience assessment of the UMRS. We describe the UMRS in the context of an...
Bouska, Kristen L.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; De Jager, Nathan R.; Hendrickson, Jon S. The table provides all fish collected using two different electrofishing methods at Illinois River sites in 2012 and 2013. Length and weights were taken on most species and gender was taken from Silver Carp. Fishes were categorized whether they were netters (caught by nets) or jumpers (jumped in the boat while sampling) and only netters were used...
Bouska, Wesley W.; Bouska, Kristen Detecting nuisance species at low abundance or in newly established areas is critical to developing pest management strategies. Due to their sensitivity to disturbance and erratic jumping behavior, Silver Carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix can be difficult to collect with traditional sampling methods. We compared catch per unit effort (CPUE) of all...
Bouska, Wesley W.; Glover, David C.; Bouska, Kristen L.; Garvey, James E.