Taxonomic reassessment of the Little pocket mouse, Perognathus longimembris (Rodentia, Heteromyidae) of southern California and northern Baja California
James L. Patton, Robert N. Fisher
2023, Therya (14) 131-160
The Little pocket mouse (Perognathus longimembris) encompasses 15 to 16 currently recognized subspecies, six of which are restricted to southern California and adjacent northern Baja California. Using cranial geomorphometric shape parameters and dorsal color variables we delineate six regional groups of populations from this area that we recognize as valid,...
Local weather and endogenous factors affect the initiation of migration in short- and medium-distance songbird migrants
Theodore J. Zenzal Jr., Darren Johnson, Frank R. Moore, Zoltán Németh
2023, Journal of Avian Biology (2023)
Migratory birds employ a variety of mechanisms to ensure appropriate timing of migration based on integration of endogenous and exogenous information. The cues to fatten and depart from the non-breeding area are often linked to exogenous cues such as temperature or precipitation and the endogenous program....
Redd superimposition mediates the accuracy, precision, and significance of redd counts for cutthroat trout
Jeffrey R. Baldock, Robert Al-Chokhachy, Timothy E. Walsworth, Annika W. Walters
2023, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (80) 825-839
Redd counts are commonly applied to estimate spawning population size for salmonids and allow for broad spatial and temporal coverage in monitoring efforts. However, the utility of redd counts may be compromised by observation error, particularly with respect to superimposition, where later arriving spawners construct redds overlapping...
Simulating debris flow and levee formation in the 2D shallow flow model D-Claw: Channelized and unconfined flow
Ryan P. Jones, Francis K. Rengers, Katherine R. Barnhart, David L. George, Dennis M. Staley, Jason W. Kean
2023, Earth and Space Science (10)
Debris flow runout poses a hazard to life and infrastructure. The expansion of human population into mountainous areas and onto alluvial fans increases the need to predict and mitigate debris flow runout hazards. Debris flows on unconfined alluvial fans can exhibit spontaneous self-channelization through levee formation that...
Microfaunal recording of recent environmental changes in the Herschel Basin, western Arctic Ocean
Jade Falardeau, Anne de Vernal, Marit-Solveig Seidenkrantz, Thomas M. Cronin, Laura Gemery, Léo Chassiot, Michael Fritz, Vladislav Carnero-Bravo, Claude Hillaire-Marcel, Philippe Archambault
2023, Journal of Foraminiferal Research (53) 20-48
Microfaunal assemblages of benthic foraminifera, ostracods, and tintinnids from two marine sediment cores retrieved from the Herschel Basin of the Canadian Beaufort Sea shelf document relationships with environmental parameters such as salinity, sea-ice cover, and turbulence. Cores YC18-HB-GC01 and PG2303-1 were collected at...
Invaders at the doorstep: Using species distribution modeling to enhance invasive plant watch lists
Catherine S. Jarnevich, Peder Engelstad, Jillian LaRoe, Brandon Hays, Terri Hogan, Jeremy Jirak, Ian Pearse, Janet S. Prevéy, Jennifer Sieraki, Annie Simpson, Jess Wenick, Nicholas Young, Helen Sofaer
2023, Ecological Informatics (75)
Watch lists of invasive species that threaten a particular land management unit are useful tools because they can draw attention to invasive species at the very early stages of invasion when early detection and rapid response efforts are often most successful. However, watch lists typically rely on the subjective selection...
Trends in tree cover change over three decades related to interannual climate variability and wildfire in California
Francis K Dwomoh, Roger F. Auch, Jesslyn F. Brown, Heather J. Tollerud
2023, Environmental Research Letters (18)
The U.S. State of California has experienced frequent drought events, hotter temperatures and other disruptions to the climate system whose effects on ecosystems have been widely reported in recent decades. Studies primarily confined to specific vegetation communities or species, individual drought incidents, or analysis over a relatively...
Climate change hotspots and implications for the global subsea telecommunications network
M.A. Clare, I.A. Yeo, L. Bricheno, Y Askenov, J. Browning, I.D. Haigh, T. Wahl, J. A. Hunter, C. Sams, Jason Chaytor, B.J. Bett, L. Carter
2023, Earth Science Reviews (237)
A global network of subsea telecommunications cables underpins our daily lives, enabling >95% of global digital data transfer, $trillions/day in financial trading, and providing critical communications links, particularly to remote, low-income countries. Despite their importance, subsea cables and their landing...
A model of transmissivity and hydraulic conductivity from electrical resistivity distribution derived from airborne electromagnetic surveys of the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, Midwest USA
Scott Ikard, Burke J. Minsley, James R. Rigby, Wade Kress
2023, Hydrogeology Journal (31) 313-334
Groundwater-flow models require the spatial distribution of the hydraulic conductivity parameter. One approach to defining this spatial distribution in groundwater-flow model grids is to map the electrical resistivity distribution by airborne electromagnetic (AEM) survey and establish a petrophysical relation between mean resistivity calculated as a...
Plant community predictions support the potential for big sagebrush range expansion adjacent to the leading edge
T. Martyn, K. Palmquist, John B. Bradford, Daniel Rodolphe Schlaepfer, W.K. Lauenroth
2023, Regional Environmental Change (23)
Big sagebrush ecosystems are widespread across drylands of western North America and provide numerous services, but the abundance of these ecosystems has declined substantially and the future of these ecosystems is uncertain. As a result, characterizing potential areas for expansion of these ecosystems is important. Species...
Identifying building locations in the wildland–urban interface before and after fires with convolutional neural networks
Neda K. Kasraee, Todd Hawbaker, Volker C. Radeloff
2023, International Journal of Wildland Fire (32) 610-621
Background: Wildland–urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated owing to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown. Additionally, CNNs are computationally intensive and technically complex, making...
Addressing a potential weakness in indices of predation, herbivory, and parasitism
Jean V. Adams
2023, Population Ecology (65) 133-144
Quantification of predation, herbivory, and parasitism is critical to understanding the dynamics and trophic interactions of populations in an ecosystem. Such quantification can be challenging if the availability or consumption of the taxa are difficult to assess. Sometimes the consumption of a single prey, forage, or host is used as...
Drivers of survival of translocated tortoises
Jeremy S Mack, Kristin H. Berry
2023, Journal of Wildlife Management (87)
Translocation of animals, especially for threatened and endangered species, is a currently popular but very challenging activity. We translocated 158 adult Agassiz's desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii), a threatened species, from the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, in the central Mojave Desert in California, USA, to 4 plots as part of...
A field test of R package GPSeqClus: For establishing animal location clusters
H. Dean Cluff, L. David Mech
2023, Ecological Solutions and Evidence (4)
The ability to track animals with Global Positioning System (GPS) collars opened an enormous potential for studying animal movements and behaviour in their natural environment. One such endeavour is to identify clusters of GPS locations as a way to estimate predator kill rate. Clapp et al. (2021) developed an R...
Incorporating temperature into seepage loss estimates for a large unlined irrigation canal
Ramon C. Naranjo, David Smith, Evan J. Lindenbach
2023, Journal of Hydrology (617)
Quantifying seepage losses from unlined irrigation canals is necessary to improve water use and conservation. The use of heat as a tracer is widely used in quantifying seepage rates across the sediment–water interface. In this study, field observations and two-dimensional numerical models...
Comparison of traditional and geometric morphometrics using Lake Huron ciscoes of the Coregonus artedi complex
Benjamin E Martin, Brian O'Malley, Randy E Eshenroder, Yu-Chun Kao, Chris Olds, Timothy P. O'Brien, Chris L. Davis
2023, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (152) 296-309
Here we determine how traditional morphometrics (TM) compares with geometric morphometrics (GM) in discriminating among morphologies of four forms of ciscoes of the Coregonus artedi complex collected from Lake Huron. One of the forms comprised two groups of the same deepwater cisco separated by capture depth, whereas the...
Structured decision making to prioritize regional bird monitoring needs
Auriel M. V. Fournier, R. Randy Wilson, Jeffrey S. Gleason, Evan M. Adams, Janell M. Brush, Robert J. Cooper, Stephen J. DeMaso, Melanie J. L. Driscoll, Peter C. Frederick, Patrick Jodice, Mary Ann Ottinger, David B. Reeves, Michael A. Seymour, Stephanie M. Sharuga, John M. Tirpak, William G. Vermillion, Theodore J. Zenzal Jr., James E. Lyons, Mark S. Woodrey
2023, INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (53) 207-217
Conservation planning for large ecosystems has multiple benefits but is often challenging to implement because of the multiple jurisdictions, species, and habitats involved. In addition, decision making at large spatial scales can be hampered because many approaches do not explicitly incorporate potentially competing values and concerns of stakeholders. After the Deepwater...
Beyond presence mapping: Predicting fractional cover of non-native vegetation in Sentinel-2 imagery using an ensemble of MaxEnt models
Todd M. Preston, Aaron N. Johnston, Kyle Gregory Ebenhoch, Robert H. Diehl
2023, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation (9) 512-526
Non-native species maps are important tools for understanding and managing biological invasions. We demonstrate a novel approach to extend presence modeling to map fractional cover (FC) of non-native yellow sweet clover Melilotus officinalis in the Northern Great Plains, USA. We used ensembles of MaxEnt models to map FC across landscapes from satellite...
Moving Aircraft River Velocimetry (MARV): Framework and proof-of-concept on the Tanana River
Carl J. Legleiter, Paul J. Kinzel, Mark Laker, Jeff Conaway
2023, Water Resources Research (59)
Information on velocity fields in rivers is critical for designing infrastructure, modeling contaminant transport, and assessing habitat. Although non-contact approaches to measuring flow velocity are well established, these methods assume a stationary imaging platform. This study eliminates this constraint by introducing a framework for moving aircraft river...
The San Francisco Estuary, USA as a reference section for an Anthropocene series
Stephen J Himson, Mark A. Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mary McGann, Richard England, Bruce E. Jaffe, Arnoud Boom, Rachael Holmes, Sue Sampson, Cerin Pye, Juan Carlos Berrio, Genevieve Tyrrell, Ian P. Wilkinson, Neil Rose, Pawel Gaca, Andrew Cundy
2023, The Anthropocene Review (10) 87-115
A San Francisco Estuary core was analysed at high resolution to assess its component stratigraphic signatures of the Anthropocene in the form of non-native species, Hg, spheroidal carbonaceous particles, δ13Corg, δ15N, radiogenic materials, and heavy metals. Time series analysis of the core using Ti data provides a...
A multimodal data fusion and deep learning framework for large-scale wildfire surface fuel mapping
Mohamad Alipour, Inga P. La Puma, Joshua J. Picotte, Kasra Shamsei, Eric Rowell, Adam Watts, Branko Kosovic, Hamed Ebrahimian, Erugrul Taciroglu
2023, Fire (6)
Accurate estimation of fuels is essential for wildland fire simulations as well as decision-making related to land management. Numerous research efforts have leveraged remote sensing and machine learning for classifying land cover and mapping forest vegetation species. In most cases that focused on surface fuel mapping, the spatial scale...
High resolution SnowModel simulations reveal future elevation-dependent snow loss and earlier, flashier surface water input for the Upper Colorado River Basin
John C. Hammond, Graham A. Sexstone, Annie L. Putman, Theodore B. Barnhart, David Rey, Jessica M. Driscoll, Glen Liston, Kristen L. Rasmussen, Daniel McGrath, Steven R. Fassnacht, Stephanie K. Kampf
2023, Earth's Future (11)
Continued climate warming is reducing seasonal snowpacks in the western United States, where >50% of historical water supplies were snowmelt-derived. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, declining snow water equivalent (SWE) and altered surface water input (SWI, rainfall and snowmelt available to enter the soil) timing and...
Green turtle movements in the Gulf of Mexico: Tracking reveals new migration corridor and habitat use suggestive of MPA expansion
Margaret Lamont, Allison Benscoter, Kristen Hart
2023, Global Ecology and Conservation (42)
Globally, Marine Protected Areas are an important tool in the conservation of large marine vertebrates. Recent studies have highlighted the use of protected areas by imperiled green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the southern Gulf of Mexico. To identify and characterize inter-nesting, migratory, and foraging areas...
Juxtaposition of intensive agriculture, vulnerable aquifers, and mixed chemical/microbial exposures in private-well tapwater in northeast Iowa
Paul M. Bradley, Dana W. Kolpin, Darrin A. Thompson, Kristin M. Romanok, Kelly L. Smalling, Sara E. Breitmeyer, Mary C. Cardon, David M. Cwiertny, Nicola Evans, R. William Field, Michael J. Focazio, Laura E. Beane Freeman, Carrie E Givens, James L. Gray, Gordon L. Hager, Michelle Hladik, Jonathan N. Hoffman, Rena R. Jones, Leslie K. Kanagy, Rachael F. Lane, R. Blaine McCleskey, Danielle Medgyesi, Elizabeth Medlock-Kakaley, Shannon M. Meppelink, Michael T. Meyer, Diana A. Stavreva, Mary H. Ward
2023, Environmental Science and Technology: Water (868)
In the United States and globally, contaminant exposure in unregulated private-well point-of-use tapwater (TW) is a recognized public-health data gap and an obstacle to both risk-management and homeowner decision making. To help address the lack of data on broad contaminant exposures in private-well TW...
Physicochemical coastal groundwater dynamics between Kauhakō Crater lake and Kalaupapa settlement, Moloka‘i, Hawai‘i
Ferdinand Oberle, Olivia Cheriton, Peter W Swarzenski, Eric K. Brown, Curt D. Storlazzi
2023, Marine Pollution Bulletin (187)
Land-based sources of groundwater pollution can be a critical threat to coral reefs, and a better understanding of “ridge-to-reef” water movement is required to advance management and coral survival in the Anthropocene. In this study a more complete understanding of the geological, atmospheric, and oceanic drivers behind coastal groundwater exchange...
