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Designing effective long-term monitoring strategies is essential for managing wildlife populations. Implementing a cost-effective, practical monitoring program is especially challenging for widespread but locally rare species. Early successional habitat preferred by the New England cottontail (NEC) has become increasingly rare and fragmented, resulting in substantial declines from their peak distribution...

Roadside amphibian citizen science (CS) programmes bring together volunteers focused on collecting scientific data while working to mitigate population declines by reducing road mortality of pond‐breeding amphibians. Despite the international popularity of these movement‐based, roadside conservation efforts (i.e. “big nights,” “bucket brigades” and “toad patrols”), direct benefits to conservation...

Acoustic surveys were conducted in late summer/early fall during the years 2004-2018 to estimate pelagic prey fish biomass in Lake Michigan. Midwater trawling during the surveys as well as acoustic target strength provided a measure of species and size composition of the fish community for use in scaling acoustic data...

Ecological studies have been conducted on the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) since the 1960s. Desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) were considered rare visitors on the NNSS, with only 9 recorded observations between 1963 and 2009, all of which were males. Females and young were not documented definitively until...

The Great Basin of the western United States, the northern component of the Basin and Range Province, is a region of Cenozoic lithospheric extension with multiple periods and types of igneous activity. The composition and volume of Cenozoic magmas reflect a complex interaction between mantle-derived magmas and highly diverse crust, where...

Studies estimating species' distributions require information about animal locations in space and time. Location data can be collected using surveys within a predetermined frame of reference (i.e., Eulerian sampling) or from animal‐borne tracking devices (i.e., Lagrangian sampling). Integration of observations obtained from Eulerian and Lagrangian perspectives can provide insights into...

We examined the extent to which supply‐side, niche, and competition theories and concepts help explain a trematode community in which one species comprises 87% of the trematode individuals, and the remaining 15 species each have <3%. We collected and dissected the common and wide‐ranging snail host Heleobia australis over four seasons from...

The U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center has conducted lake-wide surveys of the fish community in Lake Michigan each fall since 1973 using standard 12 m bottom trawls towed along contour at depths of 9 to 110 m at each of seven index transects. The survey provides relative...

1. Wetlands are critical components of freshwater biodiversity and provide ecosystem services, but human activities have resulted in large-scale loss of these habitats across the globe. To offset this loss, mitigation wetlands are frequently constructed, but their ability to replicate the functions of natural wetlands remains uncertain. Further, monitoring of...

Fluids are well known to influence earthquakes, yet rarely are earthquakes convincingly linked to precipitation. Weak modulation or limited data often leads to ambiguous interpretations. In contrast, here we find that shallow seismicity in the Sierra Nevada range near Long Valley Caldera is strongly modulated by snowmelt....

The invasive grass cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) presents major challenges for land management and habitat conservation in the western United States. Feral horses (Equus ferus caballus) have become overabundant in some areas of the West and can impact fragile semiarid ecosystems. Amid ongoing efforts to control cheatgrass in the Great Basin, we conducted a study...

Occupancy models have become a valuable tool for estimating wildlife-habitat relationships and for predicting species distributions. Highly-mobile species often violate the assumption that sampling units are geographically closed shifting the probability of occupancy to be interpreted as the probability of use. We used occupancy models, in conjunction with noninvasive sampling,...

The behavior of adults and young at the time of fledging is one of the least understood aspects of the breeding ecology of birds. Current hypotheses propose that fledging occurs either as a result of parent-offspring conflict or nestling choice. We used video recordings to monitor the behavior of nestling...

Species distribution models have many applications in conservation and ecology, and climate data are frequently a key driver of these models. Often, correlative modeling approaches are developed with readily available climate data; however, the impacts of the choice of climate normals is rarely considered. Here, we produced species distribution models...

Species distribution models are used to study biogeographic patterns and guide decision‐making. The variable quality of these models makes it critical to assess whether a model's outputs are suitable for the intended use, but commonly used evaluation approaches are inappropriate for many ecological contexts. In particular, unrealistically high performance...

In the U.S., about 44 million people rely on self-supplied groundwater for drinking water. Because most self-supplied homeowners do not treat their water to control corrosion, drinking water can be susceptible to lead (Pb) contamination from metal plumbing. To assess the types and locations of susceptible groundwater, a geochemical reaction...

This study used a 20-year dataset (1995–2014) to identify factors affecting cyanobacterial community composition (CCC) and abundance in a eutrophic lake. We hypothesized that differences in thermal structure, nutrients, and meteorology drive interannual variability in CCC and abundance. Cluster analysis differentiated dominant cyanobacteria into rare, low abundance, or sporadically occurring...

Purpose of ReviewWe examined recent literature on promoting habitat connectivity in the context of climate change (CC) and land-use change (LUC). These two global change forcings have wide-reaching ecological effects that are projected to worsen in the future. Improving connectivity is a common adaptation strategy,...

Fish assemblages in Atlantic coastal rivers have undergone extensive ecological change in the last two and a half centuries due to human influence, including extirpation of many migratory fish species, such as river herring (Alosa spp.) and introduction of nonnative piscivores, notably Smallmouth Bass Micropterus dolomieu. Recently, dam removals and...

(Fairley) When historians describe the decades preceding designation of Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), they typically focus attention on early scientific studies conducted by John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and Charles Walcott. All three of these pioneering scientists were employed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a small Federal...

Reintroductions are important components of conservation and recovery programs for rare plant species, but their long‐term success rates are poorly understood. Previous reviews of plant reintroductions focused on short‐term (e.g., ≤3 years) survival and flowering of founder individuals rather than on benchmarks of intergenerational persistence, such as seedling recruitment. However,...

The saddleback crayfish, Faxonius medius (Faxon, 1884), is endemic to a single drainage in eastern Missouri, USA, that is affected by heavy metals mining, and adjacent to a rapidly-expanding urban area. We studied populations of F. medius in two small streams for 18 months to describe the annual reproductive...

Exploring trends in species richness and the distribution of individual species over time as well as the factors affecting these trends informs conservation priorities in protecting species and ecosystems as a whole. We used data from 41 park-wide line transect surveys in 2009 and 2014 and multi-season occupancy models with...

Targeting conservation actions efficiently requires information on vulnerability of and threats to conservation targets, but such information is rarely included in conservation plans. In the U.S., recently updated State Wildlife Action Plans identify Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) selected by each state as priority areas for future action to conserve wildlife...

Coastal wetlands have a long history of degradation and destruction due to human development. Now recognized as one of the most productive ecosystems in the world, substantial efforts are being made to restore this critical habitat. While wetland restoration efforts are generally viewed as beneficial in terms of providing wildlife...