Illegal shooting of protected nongame birds along power lines coincides with places and times of peak legal recreational shooting
Eve C. Thomason, James R. Belthoff, Sharon A. Poessel, Todd E. Katzner
2024, Ornithological Applications (126)
Illegal killing of protected nongame birds is pervasive and can be demographically relevant. In 2021 and 2022, we evaluated spatial and temporal patterns in illegal killing of birds along 69.7 km of power lines in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area in Idaho, USA, to...
Earthquake relocations delineate discrete a fault network and deformation corridor throughout Southeast Alaska and Southwest Yukon
Katherine M. Biegel, Jeremy M. Gosselin, Jan Dettmer, Maurice Colpron, Eva Enkelmann, Jonathan Caine
2024, Tectonics (43)
Deformation in southeastern Alaska and southwest Yukon is governed by the subduction and translation of the Pacific-Yakutat plates relative to the North American plate in the St. Elias region. Despite notable historical seismicity and major regional faults, studies of the region between the Fairweather and Denali faults are complicated by glacial...
Discovery and genomic characterization of a novel hepadnavirus from asymptomatic anadromous alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus)
Clayton D. Raines, Jan Lovy, Nicolas B.D. Phelps, Sunil Mor, Terry Ng, Luke Iwanowicz
2024, Viruses (16)
The alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) is an anadromous herring that inhabits waters of northeastern North America. This prey species is a critical forage for piscivorous birds, mammals, and fishes in estuarine and oceanic ecosystems. During a discovery project tailored to identify potentially emerging pathogens of this species, we obtained the...
Earthquake cycle mechanics during caldera collapse: Simulating the 2018 Kīlauea eruption
Joshua Allen Crozier, Kyle R. Anderson
2024, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (129)
In multiple observed caldera-forming eruptions, the rock overlying a draining magma reservoir dropped downward along ring faults in sequences of discrete collapse earthquakes. These sequences are analogous to tectonic earthquake cycles and provide opportunities to examine fault mechanics and collapse eruption dynamics over multiple events. Collapse earthquake...
Ecological dissimilarity matters more than geographical distance when predicting land surface indicators using machine learning
Bo Zhou, Gregory S. Okin, Junzhe Zhang, Shannon L. Savage, Christopher J. Cole, Michael C. Duniway
2024, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (62)
Supervised training techniques, such as those used in machine learning, use generally large sets of in situ data to train models that can, in turn, be used to make predictions (or prediction maps) about the Earth’s surface in times or places where no in situ...
Setting a pluralist agenda for water governance: Why power and scale matter
Elizabeth Macpherson, Rosa I. Cuppari, Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, Holly Brause, William A. Brewer, William E Grant, Nicole M. Herman-Mercer, Ben Livneh, Kaustuv Raj Neupane, Tanya N. Petach, Chelsea N. Peters, Hsiao-Hsuan Wang, Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Howard Wheater
2024, WIREs Water (11)
Global water systems are facing unprecedented pressures, including climate change-driven drought and escalating flood risk, environmental contamination, and over allocation. Water management and governance typically lack integration across spatial scales, including relationships between surface and ground water systems. They also routinely ignore connectivity across temporal scales, including the need for...
Human-induced range expansions result in a recent hybrid zone between sister species of ducks
Philip Lavretsky, Kevin J. Kraai, David Butler, James Morel, Jay Alan VonBank, Joseph Marty, Vergie Musni, Daniel P. Collins
2024, Genes (15)
Landscapes are consistently under pressure from human-induced ecological change, often resulting in shifting species distributions. For some species, changing the geographical breadth of their niche space results in matching range shifts to regions other than those in which they are formally found. In this study, we employ a population genomics...
Evaluating the effectiveness of joint species distribution modeling for fresh water fish communities within large watersheds
Paul McLaughlin, Kevin Krause, Kelly O. Maloney, Taylor E Woods, Tyler Wagner
2024, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (81) 1248-1263
Accurately predicting species’ distributions is critical for the management and conservation of fish and wildlife populations. Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) account for dependencies between species often ignored by traditional species distribution models. We evaluated how a JSDM approach could improve predictive strength for stream fish communities within large watersheds...
Quantifying intraspecific variation in host resistance ad tolerance to a lethal pathogen
B. Hardy, Erin L. Muths, W. C. Funk, L. L. Bailey
2024, Journal of Animal Ecology (94) 316-329
Testing for intraspecific variation for host tolerance or resistance in wild populations is important for informing conservation decisions about captive breeding, translocation, and disease treatment. Here, we test the importance of tolerance and resistance in multiple populations of boreal toads (Anaxyrus boreas boreas) against Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the amphibian fungal pathogen...
Why do avian responses to change in Arctic green-up vary?
Eveling A. Tavera, David B. Lank, David C. Douglas, Brett K. Sandercock, Richard B. Lanctot, Niels M. Schmidt, Jeroen Reneerkens, David H. Ward, Joel Bety, Eunbi Kwon, Nicolas Lecomte, Cheri L Gratto-Trevor, Paul A. Smith, Willow B. English, Sarah T. Saalfeld, Stephen C. Brown, H. River Gates, Erica Nol, Joseph R. Liebezeit, Rebecca L. McGuire, Laura McKinnon, Steve Kendall, Martin D. Robards, Megan Boldenow, David C. Payer, Jennie Rausch, Mikhail Soloviev, Diana V. Solovyeva, Steve Zack, Jordyn Stalwick, Kirsty E. B. Gurney
2024, Article
Global climate change has altered the timing of seasonal events (i.e., phenology) for a diverse range of biota. Within and among species, however, the degree to which alterations in phenology match climate variability differ substantially. To better understand factors driving these differences, we evaluated...
Pockmarks offshore Big Sur, California provide evidence for recurrent, regional, and unconfined sediment gravity flows
E. Lundsten, Charles K. Paull, R. Gwiazda, S. Dobbs, D.W. Caress, Linda A. Kuhnz, M. Walton, N. Nieminski, Mary McGann, Thomas Lorenson, Guy R. Cochrane, Jason A. Addison
2024, Journal of Geophysical Research, Earth Surface (129)
Recent surface ship multibeam surveys of the Sur Pockmark Field, offshore Central California, reveal >5,000 pockmarks in an area that is slated to host a wind farm, between 500- and 1,500-m water depth. Extensive fieldwork was conducted to characterize the seafloor environment and its recent geologic history,...
Chronic wasting disease alters the movement behavior and habitat use of mule deer during clinical stages of infection
Gabriel M. Barrile, Paul C. Cross, Cheynne Stewart, Jennifer L. Malmberg, Rhiannon P. Jakopak, Justin Binfet, Kevin Montieth, Brandon Werner, Jessica Jennings-Gaines, JA Merkle
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Integrating host movement and pathogen data is a central issue in wildlife disease ecology that will allow for a better understanding of disease transmission. We examined how adult female mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) responded behaviorally to infection with chronic wasting disease (CWD). We compared...
Development and validation of a GT-seq panel for genetic monitoring in a threatened species using minimally invasive sampling
Molly J. Garrett, Stacey A. Nerkowski, Shannon Kieran, Nathan R. Campbell, Soraia Barbosa, Courtney J. Conway, Paul A. Hohenlohe, Lisette P. Waits
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Minimally invasive samples are often the best option for collecting genetic material from species of conservation concern, but they perform poorly in many genomic sequencing methods due to their tendency to yield low DNA quality and quantity. Genotyping-in-thousands by sequencing (GT-seq) is a powerful amplicon sequencing method that can genotype...
Repeated coseismic uplift of coastal lagoons above the Patton Bay Splay Fault System, Montague Island, Alaska, USA
Jessica DePaolis, Tina Dura, Robert C. Witter, Peter J. Haeussler, Adrian Bender, Janet H. Curran, D. Reide Corbett
2024, JGR Solid Earth (129)
Coseismic slip on the Patton Bay splay fault system during the 1964 Mw 9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake contributed to local tsunami generation and vertically uplifted shorelines as much as 11 m on Montague Island in Prince William Sound (PWS). Sudden uplift of 3.7–4.3 m caused coastal lagoons along the island's northwestern coast to...
Assessing wild turkey productivity before and after a 14-day delay in the start date of the spring hunting season in Tennessee
Joseph O. Quehl, Lindsey M. Phillips, Vincent M. Johnson, Craig A. Harper, Joseph D. Clark, Roger D. Shields, David A. Buehler
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Ten state wildlife management agencies in the United States, including six within the Southeast, have delayed their spring wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) hunting seasons since 2017 by five or more days to address concerns related to the potential effects of hunting on wild turkey seasonal productivity. One hypothesis posits that...
Static and dynamic strain in the 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake
Roger Bilham, Susan E. Hough
2024, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (114) 2687-2712
During the 1886 Mw 7.3 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake, three railroads emanating from the city were exposed to severe shaking. Expansion joints in segmented railroad tracks are designed to allow railroad infrastructure to withstand a few parts in 10,000 of thermoelastic strain. We show that, in 1886, transient contractions exceeding...
Resilience is not enough: Toward a more meaningful rangeland adaptation science
Hailey Wilmer, Daniel B. Ferguson, Maude Dinan, Eric Thacker, Peter B. Adler, Kathryn Bills Walsh, John B. Bradford, Mark Brunson, Justin D. Derner, Emile Elias, Andrew J Felton, Curtis A. Gray, Christina Greene, Mitchel P McClaran, Robert K. Shriver, Mitch Stephenson, Katharine Nash Suding
2024, Rangeland Ecology & Management (95) 56-67
Rangeland ecosystems, and their managers, face the growing urgency of climate change impacts. Researchers are therefore seeking integrative social-ecological frameworks that can enhance adaptation by managers to these climate change dynamics through tighter linkages among multiple scientific disciplines and manager contexts. Social-ecological framings, including resilience and vulnerability, are popular in...
Large-scale assessment of genetic structure to assess risk of populations of a large herbivore to disease
W. David Walter, Alberto Fameli, Kelly Russo-Petrick, Jessie E. Edson, Christopher S. Rosenberry, Krysten L. Schuler, Michael J. Tonkovich
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) can spread among cervids by direct and indirect transmission, the former being more likely in emerging areas. Identifying subpopulations allows the delineation of focal areas to target for intervention. We aimed to assess the population structure of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in the northeastern United States...
Updated range map of an endangered salamander and congeneric competitor reveals different niche preferences
Jo Avital Werba, David A. W. Miller, Adrianne Brand, Evan H. Campbell Grant
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Estimating distributions for cryptic and highly range-restricted species induces unique challenges for species distribution modeling. In particular, bioclimatic covariates that are typically used to model species ranges at regional and continental scales may not show strong variation at scales of 100s and 10s of meters. This limits both the likelihood...
Accuracy, accessibility, and institutional capacity shape the utility of habitat models for managing and conserving rare plants on western public lands
Ella M. Samuel, Jennifer K. Meineke, Laine E. McCall, Lea B. Selby, Alison C. Foster, Zoe M. Davidson, Carol A. Dawson, Catherine S. Jarnevich, Sarah K. Carter
2024, Conservation Science and Practice
Public lands are often managed for multiple uses ranging from energy development to rare plant conservation. Habitat models can help land managers assess and mitigate potential effects of projects on rare plants, but it is unclear how models are currently being used. Our goal was...
Effects of episodic stream dewatering on brook trout spatial population structure
Nathaniel P. Hitt, Karli M. Rogers, Karmann G. Kessler, Martin A. Briggs, Jennifer H. Fair, Andrew C. Dolloff
2024, Freshwater Biology (69) 1027-1041
Stream dewatering is expected to become more prevalent due to climate change, and we explored the potential consequences for brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) within a temperate forest ecosystem in eastern North America.We estimated fish density within stream pools (n = 386) from electrofishing surveys over 10 years...
The dominance and growth of shallow groundwater resources in continuous permafrost environments
Joshua C. Koch, Craig T. Connolly, Carson Baughman, Marisa Repasch, Heather Best, Andrew G. Hunt
2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (121)
Water is a limited resource in Arctic watersheds with continuous permafrost because freezing conditions in winter and the impermeability of permafrost limit storage and connectivity between surface water and deep groundwater. However, groundwater can still be an important source of surface water in such settings, feeding springs...
Metal mobilization from thawing permafrost to aquatic ecosystems is driving rusting of Arctic streams
Jonathan A. O’Donnell, Michael P. Carey, Joshua C. Koch, Carson Baughman, Kenneth Hill, Christian E. Zimmerman, Patrick F. Sullivan, Roman J. Dial, Timothy J. Lyons, David J. Cooper, Brett A. Poulin
2024, Communications Earth and Environment (5)
Climate change in the Arctic is altering watershed hydrologic processes and biogeochemistry. Here, we present an emergent threat to Arctic watersheds based on observations from 75 streams in Alaska’s Brooks Range that recently turned orange, reflecting increased loading of iron and toxic metals. Using remote sensing,...
Geographic drivers of mercury entry into aquatic food webs revealed by mercury stable isotopes in dragonfly larvae
Sarah E. Janssen, Christopher James Kotalik, James Willacker, Michael T. Tate, Colleen M Flanagan-Pritz, Sarah Nelson, David P. Krabbenhoft, David Walters, Collin A. Eagles-Smith
2024, Environmental Science and Technology (58) 13444-13455
Atmospheric mercury (Hg) emissions and subsequent transport and deposition are major concerns within protected lands, including national parks, where Hg can bioaccumulate to levels detrimental to human and wildlife health. Despite this risk to biological resources, there is limited understanding of the relative importance of different Hg sources and delivery...
Greenness and actual evapotranspiration in the unrestored riparian corridor of the Colorado River Delta in response to in-channel water deliveries in 2021 and 2022
Pamela L. Nagler, Ibrahima Sall, Martha Gomez-Sapiens, Armando Barreto-Muñoz, Christopher J. Jarchow, Karl W. Flessa, Kamel Didan
2024, Remote Sensing (16)
Natural resource managers may utilize remotely sensed data to monitor vegetation within their decision-making frameworks for improving habitats. Under binational agreements between the United States and Mexico, seven reaches were targeted for riparian habitat enhancement. Monitoring was carried out using Landsat 8 16-day intervals of the two-band enhanced vegetation index...
