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Purpose of ReviewAnthropogenic activities can lead to the loss, fragmentation, and alteration of wildlife habitats. I reviewed the recent literature (2014–2019) focused on the responses of avian, mammalian, and herpetofaunal species to oil and natural gas development, a widespread and still-expanding land use worldwide....

Executive SummaryDue to high mortality in the first year or two of life, Lost River (Deltistes luxatus sp.) and Shortnose suckers (Chasmistes brevirostris sp.) in Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon rarely reach maturity. In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began the Sucker Assisted Rearing Program (SARP) to improve...

Purpose of Review Anthropogenic activities can lead to the loss, fragmentation, and alteration of wildlife habitats. I reviewed the recent literature (2014–2019) focused on the responses of avian, mammalian, and herpetofaunal species to oil and natural gas development, a widespread and still-expanding land use worldwide. My primary goals were to...

Preliminary evidence suggests that Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha from the Yukon River may be more susceptible to Ichthyophonus sp. infections than Chinook from stocks further south. To investigate this hypothesis in a controlled environment, we experimentally challenged juvenile Chinook from the Yukon River and from the Salish Sea with Ichthyophonus sp. and evaluated mortality, infection...

AimEvolutionary radiations are central to the origin and maintenance of biodiversity, yet we rarely understand how they are jointly shaped by demography and ecological opportunity. Astragalus is the largest plant genus in the world and is disproportionately comprised of rare species restricted to narrow geographic and ecological regions. Here,...

Preserving biodiversity and its many components is a priority of conservation science and how to efficiently allocate resources to preserve healthy populations of as many species, habitats, and ecosystems as possible. We used the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gap Analysis Project (GAP) species models released in 2018, which identify predicted habitats for...

Genetic structuring of wild populations is dependent on environmental, ecological, and life-history factors. The specific role environmental context plays in genetic structuring is important to conservation practitioners working with rare species across areas with varying degrees of fragmentation. We investigated fine-scale genetic patterns of the federally threatened Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake...

One of the fundamental discoveries in Mars science in the last decade has been the extent and importance of current surface activity. Recent results have shifted our view of Mars from a world where the most interesting geologic events were in the distant past (similar to the Moon) to a...

IntroductionOn July 30, 2016, and May 27, 2018, the downtown area of Ellicott City, Maryland (fig. 1), was severely flooded by intense, short-duration rainfall that resulted in loss of life; significant damage to buildings, roads, infrastructure; and hundreds of vehicles washed away. Precipitation from the 2016 event totaled 6.60 inches...

A cloudburst on 7 August 2018 in the coastal bluffs of the Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, induced flooding, erosion and multiple shallow slope failures that adversely affected the surrounding hillside residential area. Historically, short-duration deluges are rare in the New York Bay region, with only eight cloudbursts of greater magnitude...

Fire and fuel management is a high priority in North American sagebrush ecosystems where the expansion of piñon and juniper trees and the invasion of nonnative annual grasses are altering fire regimes and resulting in loss of sagebrush species and habitat. We evaluated 10-yr effects of woody fuel treatments on...

Populations of bumble bees and other pollinators have declined over the past several decades due to numerous threats, including habitat loss and degradation. However, we can rarely investigate the role of resource loss due to a lack of detailed long‐term records of forage plants and habitats.We use 22‐year repeated...

The potential for widespread landslides is generally increased when extraordinary wet periods occur during times of elevated subsurface hydrologic conditions. A series of storms in early 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, overlapped with a period of increased shallow soil moisture and rising bedrock groundwater levels resulting from seasonally diminished evapotranspiration and...

Hibernation is an adaptation to survive periods of stress, from food limitation or harsh thermal conditions. A key question in contemporary ecology is whether rare, range-restricted species can change their behavior in response to climate change (i.e., through behavioral plasticity). The northern Idaho ground squirrel, Urocitellus brunneus (A. H. Howell, 1928), is...

Rhodoliths are important foundation species of the benthic photic zone but are poorly known and rarely studied in Alaska. A bed of Lithothamnion soriferum rhodoliths was discovered in 2008 in Kinzarof Lagoon, Alaska, a shallow-water embayment dominated by eelgrass (Zostera marina). Rhodolith presence and biomass were estimated to...

In many hydrothermal systems, fracture permeability along faults provides pathways for groundwater to transport heat from depth. Faulting generates a range of deformation styles that cross-cut heterogeneous geology, resulting in complex patterns of permeability, porosity, and hydraulic conductivity. Vertical connectivity (a throughgoing network of permeable areas...

Surficial mass wasting events are a hazard worldwide. Seismic and acoustic signals from these often remote processes, combined with other geophysical observations, can provide key information for monitoring and rapid response efforts and enhance our understanding of event dynamics. Here, we present seismoacoustic data and analyses for two very large...

Conservation planning depends on reliable information regarding the geographic distribution of species. However, our knowledge of species' distributions is often incomplete, especially when species are cryptic, difficult to survey, or rare. The use of species distribution models has increased in recent years and proven a valuable tool to evaluate habitat...

Because fire retardant can enter streams and harm aquatic species including endangered fish, agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) must estimate the downstream extent of toxic effects every time fire retardant enters streams (denoted as an “intrusion”). A challenge in estimating the length of stream...

Investigators rely on brood surveys to estimate annual fecundity of game birds. However, investigators often do not account for factors that influence brood detection probability nor rarely document how much females and their broods are disturbed (flush rates) during surveys, which could lead to biased survival...

Incorporating spatial and temporal scales into greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) population monitoring strategies is challenging and rarely implemented. Sage-grouse populations experience fluctuations in abundance that lead to temporal oscillations, making trend estimation difficult. Accounting for stochasticity is critical to reliably estimate population trends and investigate variation related to deterministic factors...

Commercial forest plantations of fast-growing species have been established globally to meet increasing demands for timber, pulpwood, and other wood products. Industrial plantations may contribute to tropical forest conservation by reducing exploitation of primary and secondary natural forests. Whether such plantations...

A key assumption in species distribution modeling (SDM) with presence‐background (PB) methods is that sampling of occurrence localities is unbiased and that any sampling bias is proportional to the background distribution of environmental covariates. This assumption is rarely met when SDM practitioners rely on federated museum...

A multi-component geochemical dataset was collected from groundwater and surface-water bodies associated with the urban Fountain Creek alluvial aquifer, Colorado, USA, to facilitate analysis of recharge sources, geochemical interactions, and groundwater-residence times. Results indicate that groundwater can be separated into three distinct geochemical zones based on location within the flow...

Sand dune ecosystems are highly dynamic landforms found along coastlines and riverine deltas where a supply of sand-sized material is available to be delivered by aquatic and wind environments. These unique ecosystems provide habitat for a variety of endemic and rare plant and animal species. Sand dunes have been affected...