Shannon White, Ph.D.

1) Movement has been studied extensively in stream salmonids, and most data suggest that population-level behavior is best described by a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution emphasizes the large proportion of sedentary individuals in a population, which can implicitly lead to assumptions of low population connectivity and overlook the ecological significance of rare individuals...

Two primary goals in fisheries research are to (i) understand how habitat and environmental conditions influence the distribution of fishes across the landscape and (ii) make predictions about how fish communities will respond to environmental and anthropogenic change. In inland, freshwater ecosystems, quantitative approaches traditionally used to accomplish these goals largely ignore...

Riverscape genetics, which applies concepts in landscape genetics to riverine ecosystems, lack appropriate quantitative methods that address the spatial autocorrelation structure of linear stream networks and account for bidirectional geneflow. To address these challenges, we present a general framework for the design and analysis of riverscape genetic studies. Our framework starts with...

Although most countries banned manufacturing of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) over 40 years ago, PCBs remain a global concern for wildlife and human health due to high bioaccumulation and biopersistance. PCB uptake mechanisms have been well studied in many taxa; however, less is known about depuration rates and how post-exposure diet can influence PCB concentrations and immune...

Understanding how stream fishes respond to changes in habitat availability is complicated by low occurrence rates of many species, which in turn reduces the ability to quantify species–habitat relationships and account for imperfect detection in estimates of species richness. Multispecies occupancy models have been used sparingly in the analysis of fisheries data, but address the...

Individual aggression and thermal refuge use were monitored in brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis in a controlled laboratory to determine how fish size and personality influence time spent in forage and thermal habitat patches during periods of thermal stress. On average, larger and more exploratory fish initiated more aggressive interactions and across all fish there was decreased...

Due to increased anthropogenic pressures on many fish populations, supplementing wild populations with captive‐raised individuals has become an increasingly common management practice. Stocking programs can be controversial due to uncertainty about the long‐term fitness effects of genetic introgression on wild populations. In particular, introgression between hatchery and wild...

While differences in individual personality are common in animal populations, understanding the ecological significance of variation has not yet been resolved. Evidence suggests that personality may influence learning and memory; a finding that could improve our understanding of the evolutionary processes that produce and maintain intraspecific behavioural heterogeneity. Here, we tested...