Assessment of two techniques for remediation of lacustrine rocky reef spawning habitat
Alex Gatch, S.K. Koenigbauer, Edward F. Roseman, T. Hook
2021, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (41) 484-497
Rocky reef habitats in lacustrine systems constitute important areas for lithophilic‐spawning fishes. Interstitial spaces created by the structure of rocky reefs form microenvironments where incubating embryos and juvenile fish are potentially protected from predators and physical displacement. However, if interstitial spaces are filled or blocked by...
Coal-mining intensity influences species and trait distributions of stream fishes in two Central Appalachian watersheds
Zachary P. Martin, Paul L. Angermeier, Serena Ciparis, Donald J. Orth
2021, Ecology of Freshwater Fish (30) 347-365
Documenting responses of biotic assemblages to coal-mining impacts is crucial to informing regulatory and reclamation actions. However, attributing biotic patterns to specific stressors is difficult given the dearth of preimpact studies and prevalence of confounding factors. Analysing species distributions and abundances, especially stratified by species traits, provides insights into how...
Characterizing patterns of genomic variation in the threatened Utah prairie dog: Implications for conservation and management
Rachel M. Giglio, Tonie E. Rocke, Jorge E. Osorio, Emily K. Latch
2021, Evolutionary Applications (14) 1036-1051
Utah prairie dogs (Cynomys parvidens) are federally threatened due to eradication campaigns, habitat destruction, and outbreaks of plague. Today, Utah prairie dogs exist in small, isolated populations, making them less demographically stable and more susceptible to erosion of genetic variation by genetic drift. We characterized patterns...
Nanopore amplicon sequencing reveals molecular convergence and local adaptation of rhodopsin in Great Lakes salmonids
Katherine Eaton, Moises Bernal, Nathan Backenstose, Daniel Yule, Trevor J. Krabbenhoft
2021, Genome Biology and Evolution (13)
Local adaptation can drive diversification of closely related species across environmental gradients and promote convergence of distantly related taxa that experience similar conditions. We examined a potential case of adaptation to novel visual environments in a species flock (Great Lakes salmonids, genus Coregonus) using a new amplicon genotyping protocol on the...
Drivers and projections of ice phenology in mountain lakes in the western United States
Timothy J Caldwell, Sudeep Chandra, Thomas Albright, Adrian Harpold, Thomas Dills, Jonathan Greenberg, Steven Sadro, Michael D. Dettinger
2021, Limnology and Oceanography (66) 995-1008
Climate change is causing rapid warming and altered precipitation patterns in mountain watersheds, both of which influence the timing of ice breakup in mountain lakes. To enable predictions of ice breakup in the future, we analyzed a dataset of mountain lake ice breakup dates derived from remote sensing and historical...
Terrestrial wildlife in the post-mined Appalachian landscape: Status and opportunities
Christopher M. Lituma, John J. Cox, Stephen F. Spear, John W. Edwards, Jesse L. De La Cruz, Lisa I. Muller, W. Mark Ford
2021, Book chapter, Appalachia's coal-mined landscapes
Coal mining is an anthropogenic stressor that has impacted terrestrial and semi-aquatic wildlife in the Appalachian Plateau since European settlement. Creation of grassland and early-successional habitats resulting from mining in a forested landscape has resulted in novel, non-analog habitat conditions. Depending on the taxa, the extent of mining on the...
Optimal sampling design for spatial capture‐recapture
Gates Dupont, J. Andrew Royle, Muhammad Ali Nawaz, Chris Sutherland
2021, Ecology (102)
Spatial capture‐recapture (SCR) has emerged as the industry standard for estimating population density by leveraging information from spatial locations of repeat encounters of individuals. The precision of density estimates depends fundamentally on the number and spatial configuration of traps. Despite this knowledge, existing sampling design recommendations are heuristic and their...
Is there enough water? How bearish and bullish outlooks are linked to decision-maker perspectives on environmental flows
Sean M. Wineland, Rachel Fovargue, Betsey York, Abigail Lynch, Craig P. Paukert, Thomas M. Neeson
2021, Journal of Environmental Management (280)
Policies that mandate environmental flows (e-flows) can be powerful tools for freshwater conservation, but implementation of these policies faces many hurdles. To better understand these challenges, we explored two key questions: (1) What additional data are needed to implement e-flows? and...
Metabarcoding assays for the detection of freshwater mussels (Unionida) with environmental DNA
Katy E. Klymus, Catherine A. Richter, Nathan Thompson, Jo Ellen Hinck, Jess W. Jones
2021, Environmental DNA (3) 231-247
Freshwater mussels of the order Unionida are a widely distributed taxon that are important in maintaining freshwater ecosystems and are also highly imperiled throughout the world. Monitoring of mussel populations with environmental DNA (eDNA) is an attractive alternative to traditional methods because it is noninvasive and...
Time-to-detection occupancy methods: Performance and utility for improving efficiency of surveys
Brian J. Halstead, Jonathan P. Rose, Patrick M. Kleeman
2021, Ecological Applications (31)
Occupancy methods propelled the quantitative study of species distributions forward by separating the observation process, or the imperfect detectability of species, from the ecological processes of interest governing species distributions. Occupancy studies come at a cost, however: the collection of additional data to account for nondetections...
Detectability and abundance of snowy plovers at Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma
K. M. Heath-Acre, W. C. Conway, Clint W. Boal, D. P. Collins, G. Hensley, W. P. Johnson, P. M. Schmidt
2021, Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management (12) 50-60
In the past two decades, Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge has been increasingly recognized as important habitat for both breeding and migratory shorebirds. North American snowy plovers Charadrius nivosus in particular rely on the nearly 5,000-ha salt flat at Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, which thousands use as breeding and stopover habitat....
Warming and microbial uptake influence the fate of added soil carbon across a Hawai'ian weathering gradient
Avishesh Neupane, Sasha C. Reed, Daniela F. Cusack
2021, Soil Biology and Biochemistry (153)
Tropical forest soils contain some of the largest carbon (C) stocks on Earth, yet the effects of warming on the fate of fresh C entering tropical soils are still poorly understood. This research sought to understand how the fate of fresh...
Influence of water temperature and biotic interactions on the distribution of westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi) in a population stronghold under climate change
Kadie Heinle, Lisa A Eby, Clint C. Muhlfeld, Amber Steed, Leslie Jones, Vincent S. D’Angelo, Andrew R. Whiteley, Mark Hubblewhite
2021, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (78) 444-456
Climate warming is expected to have substantial impacts on native trout across the Rocky Mountains, but there is little understanding of how these changes affect future distributions of co-occurring native fishes within population strongholds. We used mixed-effects logistic regression to investigate the role of abiotic (e.g., temperature) and biotic factors...
Small mammal responses to wetland restoration in the Greater Everglades ecosystem
Stephanie Romanach, Laura D’Acunto, Julia Chapman, Matthew R Hanson
2021, Restoration Ecology (29)
Wetlands have experienced dramatic losses in extent around the world, disrupting ecosystem function, habitat, and biodiversity. In Florida’s Greater Everglades, a massive restoration effort costing billions of dollars and spanning multiple decades is underway. As Everglades restoration is implemented in incremental projects, scientists and planners monitor the outcomes of projects....
A comparison of plant communities in restored, old field, and remnant coastal prairies
Laura Feher, Larry Allain, Michael Osland, Elisabeth Pigott, Christopher Reid, Nicholas Latiolais
2021, Restoration Ecology (29)
Temperate grasslands are experiencing worldwide declines due to habitat conversion. Grassland restoration efforts are employed to compensate for these losses. However, there is a need to better understand the ecological effects of grassland restoration and management practices. We investigated the effects of three different grassland management regimes on plant communities...
Evaluation of a roughness length parametrization accounting for wind–wave alignment in a coupled atmosphere–wave model
Sara Porchetta, O. Temel, John C. Warner, J.C. Munoz-Esparza, J Monbaliu, J. van Beeck, N. van Lipzig
2021, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (147) 825-846
The importance of wind energy as an alternative energy source has increased over the latest years with more focus on offshore winds. A good estimation of the offshore winds is thus of major importance for this industry. Up to now the effect of the wind–wave (mis)alignment has not yet been...
Increasing comparability among coral bleaching experiments
Andrea G. Grottoli, R. J. Toonen, R. van Woesik, R. Vega Thurber, M. E. Warner, R. H. McLachlan, James Price, K. D. Bahr, I. B. Baums, K. Castillo, M. A. Coffroth, R. Cunning, K. Dobson, M. Donahue, James L. Hench, R. Iglesias-Prieto, D. W. Kemp, C. D. Kenkel, D. I. Kline, Ilsa B. Kuffner, Jessica Matthews, A. Mayfield, J. Padilla-Gamino, S. R. Palumbi, C. R. Voolstra, V. M. Weis, H. C. Wu
2021, Ecological Applications (31)
Coral bleaching is the single largest global threat to coral reefs worldwide. Integrating the diverse body of work on coral bleaching is critical to understanding and combating this global problem. Yet investigating the drivers, patterns, and processes of coral bleaching poses a major challenge. A recent review of published experiments...
Review of trap-and-haul for managing Pacific salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) in impounded river systems
Tobias Kock, John W. Ferguson, Matthew L. Keefer, Carl B. Schreck
2021, Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries (31) 53-94
High-head dams are migration barriers for Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. in many river systems and recovery measures for impacted stocks are limited. Trap-and-haul has been widely used in attempts to facilitate recovery but information from existing programs has not been synthesized to inform improvements to aid recovery of...
Evaluating natural experiments in ecology: Using synthetic controls in assessments of remotely sensed land treatments
Stephen E. Fick, Travis W. Nauman, Colby C. Brungard, Michael C. Duniway
2021, Ecological Applications (31)
Many important ecological phenomena occur on large spatial scales and/or are unplanned and thus do not easily fit within analytical frameworks that rely on randomization, replication, and interspersed a priori controls for statistical comparison. Analyses of such large‐scale, natural experiments are common in the health and...
Variable seepage meter efficiency in high-permeability settings
Donald O. Rosenberry, Jose M Nieto-Lopez, Richard M. Webb, Sascha Muller
2021, Water (12)
The efficiency of seepage meters, long considered a fixed property associated with the meter design, is not constant in highly permeable sediments. Instead, efficiency varies substantially with seepage bag fullness, duration of bag attachment, depth of meter insertion into the sediments, and seepage velocity. Tests conducted in a seepage test...
Record fledging count from a seven-egg clutch in the Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii)
Robert N. Rosenfield, Sarah A. Sonsthagen, Ann Elizabeth Riddle-Berntsen, Evan Kuhel
2021, Wilson Journal of Ornithology (132) 460-463
Cooper's Hawks (Accipiter cooperii) typically lay 3–5 eggs per clutch, rarely 6 eggs, and there are 2 accounts of 7-egg clutches and 1 record of a maximum 8-egg clutch for the species. Brood sizes of 3–5 young are common and the previous maximum brood count is 6 young. However, in...
Systematic characterization of morphotectonic variability along the Cascadia convergent margin: Implications for shallow megathrust behavior and tsunami hazards
Janet Watt, Daniel S. Brothers
2021, Geosphere (17) 95-117
Studies of recent destructive megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis along subduction margins in Japan, Sumatra, and Chile have linked forearc morphology and structure to megathrust behavior. This connection is based on the idea that spatial variations in the frictional behavior of the megathrust influence the tectono-morphological evolution of the upper plate....
Suspended-sediment Flux in the San Francisco Estuary; Part II: the Impact of the 2013–2016 California Drought and Controls on Sediment Flux
Daniel N. Livsey, Maureen A. Downing-Kunz, David H. Schoellhamer, Andrew J. Manning
2021, Estuaries and Coasts (44) 972-990
Recent modeling has demonstrated that sediment supply is one of the primary environmental variables that will determine the sustainability of San Francisco Estuary tidal marshes over the next century as sea level rises. Therefore, understanding the environmental controls on sediment flux within the San Francisco Estuary...
Comparison of machine learning approaches used to identify the drivers of Bakken oil well productivity
Emil D. Attanasi, Philip A. Freeman, Timothy Coburn
2021, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (14) 536-555
Geologists and petroleum engineers have struggled to identify the mechanisms that drive productivity in horizontal hydraulically fractured oil wells. The machine learning algorithms of Random Forest (RF), gradient boosting trees (GBT) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were applied to a dataset containing 7311 horizontal hydraulically fractured...
Terrestrial ecological risk analysis via dietary exposure at uranium mine sites in the Grand Canyon watershed (Arizona, USA)
Jo Ellen Hinck, Danielle M. Cleveland, Bradley E. Sample
2021, Chemosphere (265)
The U.S. Department of the Interior recently included uranium (U) on a list of mineral commodities that are considered critical to economic and national security. The uses of U for commercial and residential energy production, defense applications, medical device technologies, and...
