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Prescribed fires have many benefits, but existing ignition methods are dangerous, costly, or inefficient. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a micro-UAS that can start a prescribed fire from the air, while being operated from a safe distance and without the costs associated with aerial ignition from a...

Hurricane Sandy was one of the most destructive hurricanes in US history, making landfall on the New Jersey coast on Oct 30, 2012. Storm impacts included several barrier island breaches, massive coastal erosion, and flooding. While changes to the subaerial landscape are relatively easily observed, storm-induced changes to the adjacent...

Earth’s biodiversity and carbon uptake by plants, or primary productivity, are intricately interlinked, underlie many essential ecosystem processes, and depend on the interplay among environmental factors, many of which are being changed by human activities. While ecological theory generalizes across taxa and environments, most empirical tests of factors controlling diversity...

Foraging behaviors of red wolves (Canis rufus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) are complex and their ability to form congeneric breeding pairs and hybridize further complicates our understanding of factors influencing their diets. Through scat analysis, we assessed prey selection of red wolf, coyote, and congeneric breeding pairs formed by red...

ContextBeyond the recognized importance of protecting large areas of contiguous habitat, conservation efforts for many species are complicated by the fact that patch suitability may also be affected by characteristics of the landscape within which the patch is located. Currently, little is known about the...

Avian malaria, transmitted by Culex quinquefasciatus mosquitoes in the Hawaiian Islands, has been a primary contributor to population range limitations, declines, and extinctions for many endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers. Avian malaria is strongly influenced by climate; therefore, predicted future changes are expected to expand transmission into higher elevations and intensify and...

The return of tidal inundation to over 750 acres of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge (NNWR) in fall of 2009 was the crowning moment in the effort to protect and restore the Nisqually Delta. The Nisqually NWR project complemented three earlier...

Researchers and practitioners alike often need to understand and characterize how water and solutes move through a stream in terms of the relative importance of in-stream and near-stream storage and transport processes. In-channel and subsurface storage processes are highly variable in space and time and difficult to measure. Storage estimates...

The mottled duck (Anas fulgivula) is a non-migratory duck dependent on coastal habitats to meet all of its life cycle requirements in the Western Gulf Coast (WGC) of Texas and Louisiana, USA. This population of mottled ducks has experienced a moderate decline during the past 2 decades. Adult survival has...

The caldera-forming eruption of the Aniakchak volcano in the Aleutian Range on the Alaskan Peninsula at 3.6 cal kyr BP was one of the largest Holocene eruptions worldwide. The resulting ash is found as a visible sediment layer in several Alaskan sites and as a cryptotephra on Newfoundland and Greenland. This large...

ContextTemperate grasslands and their dependent species are exposed to high variability in weather and climate due to the lack of natural buffers such as forests. Grassland birds are particularly vulnerable to this variability, yet have failed to shift poleward in response to recent climate change...

Extraordinary marine inundation scattered clasts southward on the island of Anegada, 120 km south of the Puerto Rico Trench, sometime between 1200 and 1480 calibrated years (cal yr) CE. Many of these clasts were likely derived from a fringing reef and from the sandy flat that separates the reef...

Sparse information exists about the ecology of Spiny Softshell Turtles (Apalone spinifera) in large rivers, at the northwestern extent of their natural range, and in Montana, where they are disjunct from downstream populations and a State Species of Concern. We determined spatiotemporal ecology of 47 female and 12 male turtles...

Our different kinds of minds and types of thinking affect the ways we decide, take action, and cooperate (or not). Derived from these types of minds, innate biases, beliefs, heuristics, and values (BBHV) influence behaviors, often beneficially, when individuals or small groups face immediate, local, acute situations that they and...

Grande Riviere beach, on the island of Trinidad, supports the largest nesting population of leatherback turtles in the Caribbean region. Throughout the nesting season, nests are naturally disturbed by newly nesting females, resulting in egg breakage and loss of some nest viability. This environment is ideal for the growth and...

Network analysis is used to address diverse ecological, social, economic, and epidemiological questions, but few efforts have been made to combine these field-specific analyses into interdisciplinary approaches that effectively address how complex systems are interdependent and connected to one another. Identifying and understanding these cross-boundary connections improves natural resource management...

No abstract available....

AimOur understanding of the effects of invasive species on faunal diversity is limited in part because invasions often occur in modified landscapes where other drivers of community diversity can exacerbate or reduce the net impacts of an invader. Furthermore, rigorous assessments of the effects of invasive species on native communities...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) can be used as an assessment tool to detect populations of threatened species and provide fine-scale data required to make management decisions. The objectives of this project were to use quantitative PCR (qPCR) to: (i) detect spiked salamander DNA in soil, (ii) quantify eDNA degradation over time,...

The earliest dispersal of humans into North America is a contentious subject, and proposed early sites are required to meet the following criteria for acceptance: (1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context; (2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating; (3) multiple lines of...

Monitoring rare species can be difficult, especially across large spatial extents, making conventional methods of population monitoring costly and logistically challenging. Citizen science has the potential to produce observational data across large areas that can be used to monitor wildlife distributions using occupancy models. We used citizen science (i.e., hunter...

White Suckers Catostomus commersonii are an important source of fresh bait for the Maine lobster fishery. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife began issuing commercial harvest permits in 1991, without reporting requirements or limits on the number of permits. There is recent concern that overfishing may be occurring. To infer...

With publication of Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes in 2009, the American Fisheries Society (AFS) recommended standard procedures for North America. To explore interest in standardizing at intercontinental scales, a symposium attended by international specialists in freshwater fish sampling was convened at the 145th Annual AFS Meeting in Portland,...

The Evergreen basin is a 40-km-long, 8-km-wide Cenozoic sedimentary basin that lies mostly concealed beneath the northeastern margin of the Santa Clara Valley near the south end of San Francisco Bay (California, USA). The basin is bounded on the northeast by the strike-slip Hayward fault and an approximately parallel subsurface...

Drought events are increasing globally, and reports of consequent forest mortality are widespread. However, due to a lack of a quantitative global synthesis, it is still not clear whether drought-induced mortality rates differ among global biomes and whether functional traits influence the risk of drought-induced mortality. To address these uncertainties,...