Robert N Fisher
Biography
Dr. Robert Fisher is a conservation biologist with the US Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center and works as part of a large integrated team. His focus has been on how natural systems are responding to the Anthropocene, and what types of resiliency they have or lack as it relates to maintaining ecological integrity and biodiversity. Additionally, through understanding individual species and community responses to perturbations through modern monitoring techniques, he and his team can determine appropriate management experiments or options to possibly recover resiliency. Geographically they have two foci, the first is southern California where urbanization and conservation planning bring various direct and indirect drivers of ecological change, and climate variability is currently extreme and drives landscape level drought and wildfires. Their second foci are the tropical islands of the Pacific Basin, from Palau and Papua New Guinea east to Hawai’i. These islands have also been driven by human change and are on the front line as extreme recent weather variability in the cyclone belt impact terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding how biodiversity was generated in this ecoregion is critical to managing its loss, and their team focuses across time and space (biogeography) to understand these processes utilizing molecular tools tied to expeditions of discovery in this poorly studied ecoregion.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., Population Biology, University of California, Davis, CA 1995
- M.S., Zoology, University of California, Davis, CA 1991
- B.S., Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA 1988
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Conservation biology
- Biogeography
- Modelling
- Natural history
- Speciation
- Invasive species
- Climate variability
- Anthropocene
Science and Products
Ants as a measure of effectiveness of habitat conservation planning in southern California
In the United States multispecies habitat conservation plans were meant to be the solution to conflicts between economic development and protection of biological diversity. Although now widely applied, questions exist concerning the scientific credibility of the conservation planning process and effectiveness of the plans. We used ants to assess...
Mitrovich, Milan J.; Matsuda, Tritia; Pease, Krista H.; Fisher, Robert N. A rapid, strong, and convergent genetic response to urban habitat fragmentation in four divergent and widespread vertebrates
Background: Urbanization is a major cause of habitat fragmentation worldwide. Ecological and conservation theory predicts many potential impacts of habitat fragmentation on natural populations, including genetic impacts. Habitat fragmentation by urbanization causes populations of animals and plants to be isolated in patches of suitable habitat...
Delaney, Kathleen Semple; Riley, Seth P.D.; Fisher, Robert N.
Biosecurity Plan for Palmyra Atoll
This Biosecurity Plan for Palmyra Atoll was developed for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Palmyra Program to refine and expand goals and objectives developed through the Conservation Action Plan process. The Biosecurity Plan is one in a series of adaptive management plans designed to achieve TNC's mission toward the protection and enhancement of...
Hathaway, Stacie A.; Fisher, Robert N. Considering native and exotic terrestrial reptiles in island invasive species eradication programmes in the Tropical Pacific
Most island restoration projects with reptiles, either as direct beneficiaries of conservation or as indicators of recovery responses, have been on temperate or xeric islands. There have been decades of research, particularly on temperate islands in New Zealand, on the responses of native reptiles to mammal eradications but very few studies in...
Veitch, C.R.; Clout, Mike N.; Towns, D. R.; Fisher, Richard N. Reptile and amphibian responses to large-scale wildfires in southern California
In 2003, southern California experienced several large fires that burned thousands of hectares of wildlife habitats and conserved lands. To investigate the effects of these fires on the reptile and amphibian communities, we compared the results from prefire herpetofauna and vegetation sampling to two years of postfire sampling across 38 burned and...
Rochester, C.J.; Brehme, C.S.; Clark, D.R.; Stokes, D.C.; Hathaway, S.A.; Fisher, R. N. Stomach nematodes (Mastophorus Muris) in rats (Rattus rattus) are associated with coconut (Cocos nucifera) Habitat at palmyra atoll
Black rats (Rattus rattus) and their stomach nematodes (Mastophorus muris) were historically introduced to islets at Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific Line Islands. To investigate patterns of parasitism, we trapped rats and quantified nematodes on 13 islets of various sizes and habitat types. Most rats were parasitized (59) with an average of...
Lafferty, K. D.; Hathaway, S.A.; Wegmann, A.S.; Shipley, F.S.; Backlin, A.R.; Helm, J.; Fisher, R. N. Behavioral response of the coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum) to habitat fragment size and isolation in an urban landscape
Habitat fragmentation is a significant threat to biodiversity worldwide. Habitat loss and the isolation of habitat fragments disrupt biological communities, accelerate the extinction of populations, and often lead to the alteration of behavioral patterns typical of individuals in large, contiguous natural areas. We used radio-telemetry to study...
Mitrovich, Milan J.; Diffendorfer, Jay E.; Fisher, Robert N. Surface-dwelling and subterranean invertebrate fauna associated with giant reed (Arundo donax Poaceae) in Southern California
In the southwestern United States giant reed, Arundo donax, is a non-native invasive plant that has become widely established in moist places and forms its largest stands along riparian corridors. The most widely reported negative effects include competition with native species, increased rate of transpiration, increased potential for wildfires,...
Lovich, Robert E.; Ervin, Edward L.; Fisher, Robert N.
Sample collection of ash and burned soils from the October 2007 southern California Wildfires
Between November 2 through 9, 2007 scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collected samples of ash and burned soils from 28 sites in six areas burned as a result of the Southern California wildfires of October 2007, including the Harris, Witch, Santiago, Ammo, Canyon, and Grass Valley Fires. The primary goal of this sampling and...
Hoefen, Todd M.; Kokaly, Raymond F.; Martin, Deborah A.; Rochester, Carlton J.; Plumlee, Geoffrey S.; Mendez, Greg; Reichard, Eric G.; Fisher, Robert N. Characterizing and predicting species distributions across environments and scales: Argentine ant occurrences in the eye of the beholder
Aim: Species distribution models (SDMs) or, more specifically, ecological niche models (ENMs) are a useful and rapidly proliferating tool in ecology and global change biology. ENMs attempt to capture associations between a species and its environment and are often used to draw biological inferences, to predict potential occurrences in unoccupied...
Menke, S.B.; Holway, D.A.; Fisher, R. N.; Jetz, W. Effect of species rarity on the accuracy of species distribution models for reptiles and amphibians in southern California
Aim: Several studies have found that more accurate predictive models of species' occurrences can be developed for rarer species; however, one recent study found the relationship between range size and model performance to be an artefact of sample prevalence, that is, the proportion of presence versus absence observations in the data used to train...
Franklin, J.; Wejnert, K.E.; Hathaway, S.A.; Rochester, C.J.; Fisher, R. N. Loss of genetic connectivity and diversity in urban microreserves in a southern California endemic Jerusalem cricket (Orthoptera: Stenopelmatidae: Stenopelmatus n. sp. "santa monica")
Microreserves may be useful in protecting native arthropod diversity in urbanized landscapes. However, species that do not disperse through the urban matrix may eventually be lost from these fragments. Population extinctions may be precipitated by an increase in genetic differentiation among fragments and loss of genetic diversity within fragments...
Vandergast, A. G.; Lewallen, E.A.; Deas, J.; Bohonak, A.J.; Weissman, D.B.; Fisher, R. N.