Genomic single-nucleotide polymorphisms confirm that Gunnison and Greater sage-grouse are genetically well differentiated and that the Bi-State population is distinct
Sara J. Oyler-McCance, Robert S. Cornman, Kenneth L. Jones, Jennifer A. Fike
2015, The Condor (117) 217-227
Sage-grouse are iconic, declining inhabitants of sagebrush habitats in western North America, and their management depends on an understanding of genetic variation across the landscape. Two distinct species of sage-grouse have been recognized, Greater (Centrocercus urophasianus) and Gunnison sage-grouse (C. minimus), based on morphology, behavior, and variation at neutral genetic...
Analysis and selection of magnitude relations for the Working Group on Utah Earthquake Probabilities
Christopher DuRoss, Susan Olig, David Schwartz
2015, Conference Paper, Basin and Range Province Seismic Hazards Summit III, Utah Geological Survey Miscellaneous Publication 15-5
Prior to calculating time-independent and -dependent earthquake probabilities for faults in the Wasatch Front region, the Working Group on Utah Earthquake Probabilities (WGUEP) updated a seismic-source model for the region (Wong and others, 2014) and evaluated 19 historical regressions on earthquake magnitude (M). These regressions relate M to fault parameters...
Using the Maxent program for species distribution modelling to assess invasion risk
Catherine S. Jarnevich, Nicholas E. Young
R.C Venette, editor(s)
2015, Book chapter, Pest Risk Modelling and Mapping for Invasive Alien Species
MAXENT is a software package used to relate known species occurrences to information describing the environment, such as climate, topography, anthropogenic features or soil data, and forecast the presence or absence of a species at unsampled locations. This particular method is one of the most popular species distribution modelling techniques...
Quantifying stream thermal regimes at management-pertinent scales: combining thermal infrared and stationary stream temperature data in a novel modeling framework.
Shane J. Vatland, Robert E. Gresswell, Geoffrey C. Poole
2015, Water Resources Research (51) 31-46
Accurately quantifying stream thermal regimes can be challenging because stream temperatures are often spatially and temporally heterogeneous. In this study, we present a novel modeling framework that combines stream temperature data sets that are continuous in either space or time. Specifically, we merged the fine spatial resolution of thermal infrared...
Incorporating temporal variation in seabird telemetry data: time variant kernel density models
Andrew Gilbert, Evan M. Adams, Carl Anderson, Alicia Berlin, Timothy D. Bowman, Emily Connelly, Scott Gilliland, Carrie E. Gray, Christine Lepage, Dustin Meattey, William Montevecchi, Jason Osenkowski, Lucas Savoy, Iain Stenhouse, Kathryn Williams
2015, Report
A key component of the Mid-Atlantic Baseline Studies project was tracking the individual movements of focal marine bird species (Red-throated Loon [Gavia stellata], Northern Gannet [Morus bassanus], and Surf Scoter [Melanitta perspicillata]) through the use of satellite telemetry. This element of the project was a collaborative effort with the Department...
Low productivity of Chinook salmon strongly correlates with high summer stream discharge in two Alaskan rivers in the Yukon drainage
Jason R. Neuswanger, Mark S. Wipfli, Matthew J. Evenson, Nicholas F. Hughes, Amanda E. Rosenberger
2015, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (72) 1125-1137
Yukon River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations are declining for unknown reasons, creating hardship for thousands of stakeholders in subsistence and commercial fisheries. An informed response to this crisis requires understanding the major sources of variation in Chinook salmon productivity. However, simple stock–recruitment models leave much of the variation in...
Numerical modeling of injection, stress and permeability enhancement during shear stimulation at the Desert Peak Enhanced Geothermal System
David Dempsey, Sharad Kelkar, Nick Davatzes, Stephen H. Hickman, Daniel Moos
2015, International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences (78) 190-206
Creation of an Enhanced Geothermal System relies on stimulation of fracture permeability through self-propping shear failure that creates a complex fracture network with high surface area for efficient heat transfer. In 2010, shear stimulation was carried out in well 27-15 at Desert Peak geothermal field, Nevada, by injecting cold water...
Do laboratory species protect endangered species? Interspecies variation in responses to 17β-estradiol, a model endocrine active compound
Zachary G. Jorgenson, Kevin J. Buhl, Stephen E. Bartell, Heiko L. Schoenfuss
2015, Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology (68) 204-215
Although the effects of estrogens on model laboratory species are well documented, their utility as surrogates for other species, including those listed as endangered, are less clear. Traditionally, conservation policies are evaluated based on model organism responses but are intended to protect all species in an environment. We tested the...
Migrations and swimming capabilities of endangered pallid sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus albus) to guide passage designs in the fragmented Yellowstone River
P. J. Braaten, Caroline M. Elliott, Jason C. Rhoten, D. B. Fuller, Brandon J. McElroy
2015, Restoration Ecology (23) 186-195
Fragmentation of the Yellowstone River is hypothesized to preclude recruitment of endangered Scaphirhynchus albus (pallid sturgeon) by impeding upstream spawning migrations and access to upstream spawning areas, thereby limiting the length of free-flowing river required for survival of early life stages. Building on this hypothesis, the reach of the Yellowstone River affected...
Bioenergetics modeling of percid fishes
Charles P. Madenjian
Patrick Kestemont, Konrad Dabrowski, Robert C. Summerfelt, editor(s)
2015, Book chapter, Biology and culture of percid fishes
A bioenergetics model for a percid fish represents a quantitative description of the fish’s energy budget. Bioenergetics modeling can be used to identify the important factors determining growth of percids in lakes, rivers, or seas. For example, bioenergetics modeling applied to yellow perch (Perca flavescens) in the western...
Shoreface response and recovery to Hurricane Sandy: Fire Island, NY
Timothy R. Nelson, Cheryl J. Hapke
Ping Wang, Julie D. Rosati, Jun Cheng, editor(s)
2015, Conference Paper, The proceedings of the coastal sediments 2015
The shoreface of Fire Island was extensively modified by Hurricane Sandy and subsequent storms in the following winter months. The changes were evaluated using various morphometrics of the shoreface from four bathymetric surveys, one prior to Hurricane Sandy, and three over the course of twenty months following Sandy. The datasets...
Evaluation of statistical treatments of left-censored environmental data using coincident uncensored data sets. II. Group comparisons
Ronald C. Antweiler
2015, Environmental Science & Technology (49) 13439-13446
The main classes of statistical treatments that have been used to determine if two groups of censored environmental data arise from the same distribution are substitution methods, maximum likelihood (MLE) techniques, and nonparametric methods. These treatments along with using all instrument-generated data (IN), even those less than the detection limit,...
Combined effects of climate, predation, and density dependence on Greater and Lesser Scaup population dynamics
Beth E. Ross, Mevin Hooten, Jean-Michel DeVink, David N. Koons
2015, Ecological Applications (25) 1606-1617
An understanding of species relationships is critical in the management and conservation of populations facing climate change, yet few studies address how climate alters species interactions and other population drivers. We use a long-term, broad-scale data set of relative abundance to examine the influence of climate, predators, and density dependence...
Accounting for imperfect detection in Hill numbers for biodiversity studies
Kristin M. Broms, Mevin Hooten, Ryan M. Fitzpatrick
2015, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (6) 99-108
Hill numbers unify biodiversity metrics by combining several into one expression. For example, species richness, Shannon's diversity index and the Gini–Simpson index are a few of the most used diversity measures, and they can be expressed as Hill numbers. Traditionally, Hill numbers have been calculated from relative...
Restricted spatial regression in practice: Geostatistical models, confounding, and robustness under model misspecification
Ephraim M. Hanks, Erin M. Schliep, Mevin Hooten, Jennifer A. Hoeting
2015, Environmetrics (26) 243-254
In spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs), covariates that are spatially smooth are often collinear with spatially smooth random effects. This phenomenon is known as spatial confounding and has been studied primarily in the case where the spatial support of the process being studied is discrete (e.g., areal spatial data)....
Tsunami geology in paleoseismology
Yuichi Nishimura, Bruce E. Jaffe
2015, Report, The Contribution of Palaeoseismology to Seismic Hazard Assessment in Site Evaluation for Nuclear Installations
The 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tohoku-oki disasters dramatically demonstrated the destructiveness and deadliness of tsunamis. For the assessment of future risk posed by tsunamis it is necessary to understand past tsunami events. Recent work on tsunami deposits has provided new information on paleotsunami events, including their recurrence interval and...
Modifications to risk-targeted seismic design maps for subduction and near-fault hazards
Abbie B. Liel, Nico Luco, Meera Raghunandan, C. Champion
Terje Haukaas, editor(s)
2015, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on applications of statistics and probability in civil engineering (ICASP12)
ASCE 7-10 introduced new seismic design maps that define risk-targeted ground motions such that buildings designed according to these maps will have 1% chance of collapse in 50 years. These maps were developed by iterative risk calculation, wherein a generic building collapse fragility curve is convolved with the U.S. Geological...
Fishes of the Blackwater River Drainage, Tucker County, West Virginia
Daniel A. Cincotta, Stuart A. Welsh, Douglas P. Wegman, Thomas E. Oldham, Lara B. Hedrick
2015, Southeastern Naturalist (14) 297-313
The Blackwater River, a tributary of the upper Cheat River of the Monongahela River, hosts a modest fish fauna. This relatively low diversity of fish species is partly explained by its drainage history. The Blackwater was once part of the prehistoric, northeasterly flowing St. Lawrence River. During the Pleistocene Epoch,...
Hydrodynamic modeling to evaluate the influence of constructed side-channel habitat on larval drift of pallid strugeon in the Lower Missouri River
Susannah O. Erwin, Robert B. Jacobson
2015, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the joint federal interagency conference 2015: Proceedings of papers of the 5th federal interagency hydrologic modeling conference and the 10th federal interagency sedimentation conference (Proceedings of the 3rd joint federal interagency conference on sedimentation and hydrologic modeling)
Larval drift is a critical phase of ontogeny for many species of lotic fishes. Downstream advection and dispersion of drifting larvae or eggs is controlled by the complex interaction of flow regime, channel planform, local channel morphology, and the resulting hydraulic gradients. In many regulated rivers, channel engineering and perturbations...
Drought monitoring and assessment: Remote sensing and modeling approaches for the Famine Early Warning Systems Network
Gabriel B. Senay, Naga Manohar Velpuri, Stefanie Bohms, Michael Budde, Claudia Young, James Rowland, James Verdin
2015, Book chapter
Drought monitoring is an essential component of drought risk management. It is usually carried out using drought indices/indicators that are continuous functions of rainfall and other hydrometeorological variables. This chapter presents a few examples of how remote sensing and hydrologic modeling techniques are being used to generate a suite of...
High‐resolution trench photomosaics from image‐based modeling: Workflow and error analysis
Nadine G. Reitman, Scott E.K. Bennett, Ryan D. Gold, Richard W. Briggs, Christopher DuRoss
2015, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (105) 2354-2366
Photomosaics are commonly used to construct maps of paleoseismic trench exposures, but the conventional process of manually using image‐editing software is time consuming and produces undesirable artifacts and distortions. Herein, we document and evaluate the application of image‐based modeling (IBM) for creating photomosaics and 3D models of paleoseismic trench exposures,...
Net ecosystem production and organic carbon balance of U.S. East Coast estuaries: A synthesis approach
Maria Herrmann, Raymond G. Najjar, W. Michael Kemp, Richard B. Alexander, Elizabeth W. Boyer, Wei-Jun Cai, Peter C. Griffith, Kevin D. Kroeger, S. Leigh McCallister, Richard A. Smith
2015, Global Biogeochemical Cycles (29) 96-111
Net ecosystem production (NEP) and the overall organic carbon budget for the estuaries along the East Coast of the United States are estimated. We focus on the open estuarine waters, excluding the fringing wetlands. We developed empirical models relating NEP to loading ratios of dissolved inorganic nitrogen to total organic...
Duckling survival, fecundity, and habitat selection of mottled duck broods on the upper Texas Gulf Coast
Elizabeth A. Rigby, David A. Haukos
2015, Journal of the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (2) 156-163
Mottled ducks (Anas fulvigula) on the western Gulf Coast have exhibited a steep population decline since the mid 1990s. Low rates of breeding incidence and nest success have been implicated in this decline, but duckling survival and the habitat needs of broods have not been previously investigated in this region....
Day-roost tree selection by northern long-eared bats - What do non-roost tree comparisons and one year of data really tell us?
Alexander Silvis, W. Mark Ford, Eric R. Britzke
2015, Global Ecology and Conservation (3) 756-763
Bat day-roost selection often is described through comparisons of day-roosts with randomly selected, and assumed unused, trees. Relatively few studies, however, look at patterns of multi-year selection or compare day-roosts used across years. We explored day-roost selection using 2 years of roost selection data for female northern long-eared bats (Myotis...
Copper toxicity and organic matter: Resiliency of watersheds in the Duluth Complex, Minnesota, USA
Nadine M. Piatak, Robert R. Seal, Perry M. Jones, Laurel G. Woodruff
2015, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Acid Rock Drainage and IMWA Annual Conference
We estimated copper (Cu) toxicity in surface water with high dissolved organic matter (DOM) for unmined mineralized watersheds of the Duluth Complex using the Biotic Ligand Model (BLM), which evaluates the effect of DOM, cation competition for biologic binding sites, and metal speciation. A sediment-based BLM was used to estimate...
