Improving predictions of tropical forest response to climate change through integration of field studies and ecosystem modeling
Xiaohui Feng, Maria Uriarte, Grizelle Gonzalez, Sasha C. Reed, Jill Thompson, Jess K. Zimmerman, Lora Murphy
2018, Global Change Biology (24) e213-e232
Tropical forests play a critical role in carbon and water cycles at a global scale. Rapid climate change is anticipated in tropical regions over the coming decades and, under a warmer and drier climate, tropical forests are likely to be net sources of carbon rather than sinks. However, our understanding...
Green tree frog (Hyla cinerea) and ground squirrel (Xerospermophilus spilosoma) mortality attributed to inland brevetoxin transportation at Padre Island National Seashore, Texas, 2015
Danielle E. Buttke, Alicia Walker, I-Shuo Huang, Leanne Flewelling, Julia S. Lankton, Anne E. Ballmann, Travis Clapp, James Lindsay, Paul V. Zimba
2018, Journal of Wildlife Diseases (51) 142-146
On 16 September 2015, a red tide (Karenia brevis) bloom impacted coastal areas of Padre Island National Seashore Park. Two days later and about 0.9 km inland, 30–40 adult green tree frogs (Hyla cinerea) were found dead after displaying tremors, weakness, labored breathing, and other signs of neurologic impairment. A...
Fine-scale habitat preference of green sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris) within three spawning locations in the Sacramento River, California
Megan T. Wyman, Michael J. Thomas, Richard R. McDonald, Alexander R. Hearn, Ryan D. Batt, Eric D. Chapman, Paul J. Kinzel, J. Tobey Minear, Ethan A. Mora, Jonathan M. Nelson, Matthew D. Pagel, A. Peter Klimley
2018, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (75) 779-791
Vast sections of the Sacramento River have been listed as critical habitat by the National Marine Fisheries Service for green sturgeon spawning (Acipenser medirostris), yet spawning is known to occur at only a few specific locations. This study reveals the range of physical habitat variables selected by adult green sturgeon...
Long-term trends in restoration and associated land treatments in the southwestern United States
Stella M. Copeland, Seth M. Munson, David S. Pilliod, Justin L. Welty, John B. Bradford, Bradley J. Butterfield
2018, Restoration Ecology (26) 311-322
Restoration treatments, such as revegetation with seeding or invasive species removal, have been applied on U.S. public lands for decades. Temporal trends in these management actions have not been extensively summarized previously, particularly in the southwestern United States where invasive plant species, drought, and fire have altered dryland ecosystems. We...
Climate variability and vadose zone controls on damping of transient recharge
Claudia R. Corona, Jason J. Gurdak, Jesse E. Dickinson, T.P.A. Ferre, Edwin P. Maurer
2018, Journal of Hydrology (561) 1094-1104
Increasing demand on groundwater resources motivates understanding of the controls on recharge dynamics so model predictions under current and future climate may improve. Here we address questions about the nonlinear behavior of flux variability in the vadose zone that may explain previously reported teleconnections between global-scale climate variability and fluctuations...
A detailed risk assessment of shale gas development on headwater streams in the Pennsylvania portion of the Upper Susquehanna River Basin, U.S.A.
Kelly O. Maloney, John A. Young, Stephen Faulkner, Atesmachew Hailegiorgis, E. Terrence Slonecker, Lesley Milheim
2018, Science of the Total Environment (610-611) 154-166
The development of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) involves infrastructure development (well pads, roads and pipelines), well drilling and stimulation (hydraulic fracturing), and production; all of which have the potential to affect stream ecosystems. Here, we developed a fine-scaled (1:24,000) catchment-level disturbance intensity index (DII) that included 17 measures of...
Northern tamarisk beetle (Diorhabda carinulata) and tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) interactions in the Colorado River basin
Pamela L. Nagler, Uyen Nguyen, Heather L. Bateman, Christopher Jarchow, Edward P. Glenn, William J. Waugh, Charles van Riper III
2018, Restoration Ecology (26) 348-359
Northern tamarisk beetles (Diorhabda carinulata) were released in the Upper Colorado River Basin in the United States in 2004–2007 to defoliate introduced tamarisk shrubs (Tamarix spp.) in the region’s riparian zones. The primary purpose was to control the invasive shrub and reduce evapotranspiration (ET) by tamarisk in an attempt to increase stream...
Increasing rock-avalanche size and mobility in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska detected from 1984 to 2016 Landsat imagery
Jeffrey A. Coe, Erin Bessette-Kirton, Marten Geertsema
2018, Landslides (15) 393-407
In the USA, climate change is expected to have an adverse impact on slope stability in Alaska. However, to date, there has been limited work done in Alaska to assess if changes in slope stability are occurring. To address this issue, we used 30-m Landsat imagery acquired from 1984 to...
Range estimates and habitat use of invasive Silver Carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix): Evidence of sedentary and mobile individuals
Austin R. Prechtel, Alison A. Coulter, Luke Etchison, P. Ryan Jackson, Reuben R. Goforth
2018, Hydrobiologia (805) 203-218
Unregulated rivers provide unobstructed corridors for the dispersal of both native and invasive species. We sought to evaluate range size and habitat use of an invasive species (Silver Carp, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) in an unimpounded river reach (Wabash River, IN), to provide insights into the dispersal of invasive species...
Spectrophotometry of Artemisia tridentata to quantitatively determine subspecies
Bryce Richardson, Alicia Boyd, Tanner Tobiasson, Matthew J. Germino
2018, Rangeland Ecology and Management (71) 87-90
Ecological restoration is predicated on our abilities to discern plant taxa. Taxonomic identification is a first step in ensuring that plants are appropriately adapted to the site. An example of the need to identify taxonomic differences comes from big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata). This species is composed of three predominant subspecies...
Weather-centric rangeland revegetation planning
Stuart P. Hardegree, John T. Abatzoglou, Mark W. Brunson, Matthew J. Germino, Katherine C. Hegewisch, Corey A. Moffet, David S. Pilliod, Bruce A. Roundy, Alex R. Boehm, Gwendwr R. Meredith
2018, Rangeland Ecology and Management (71) 1-11
Invasive annual weeds negatively impact ecosystem services and pose a major conservation threat on semiarid rangelands throughout the western United States. Rehabilitation of these rangelands is challenging due to interannual climate and subseasonal weather variability that impacts seed germination, seedling survival and establishment, annual weed dynamics, wildfire frequency, and soil...
Fishing activities
Ferdinand K. J. Oberle, Pere Puig, Jacobo Martin
Aaron Micallef, Sebastian Krastel, Alessandra Savini, editor(s)
2018, Book chapter, Submarine geomorphology
Unlike the major anthropogenic changes that terrestrial and coastal habitats underwent during the last centuries such as deforestation, river engineering, agricultural practices or urbanism, those occurring underwater are veiled from our eyes and have continued nearly unnoticed. Only recent advances in remote sensing and deep marine sampling technologies have revealed...
Seed origin and warming constrain lodgepole pine recruitment, slowing the pace of population range shifts
Erin Conlisk, Cristina Castanha, Matthew J. Germino, Thomas T. Veblen, Jeremy M. Smith, Andrew B. Moyes, Lara M. Kueppers
2018, Global Change Biology (24) 197-211
Understanding how climate warming will affect the demographic rates of different ecotypes is critical to predicting shifts in species distributions. Here we present results from a common garden, climate change experiment in which we measured seedling recruitment of lodgepole pine, a widespread North American conifer that is also planted globally....
Corresponding long-term shifts in stream temperature and invasive fish migration
Erin L. McCann, Nicholas S. Johnson, Kevin Pangle
2018, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (75) 772-778
By investigating historic trapping records of invasive sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) throughout tributaries to the Laurentian Great Lakes, we found that upstream spawning migration timing was highly correlated with stream temperatures over large spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, several streams in our study exceeded a critical spring thermal threshold (i.e.,...
Temporal variation of tectonic tremor activity in southern Taiwan around the 2010 ML6.4 Jiashian Earthquake
Kevin Chao, Zhigang Peng, Ya-Ju Hsu, Kazushige Obara, Kuo-En Ching, Chunquan Wu, Hsin-Chieh Pu, Peih-Lin Leu, Aaron Wech
2018, Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth (122) 5417-5434
Deep tectonic tremor, which is extremely sensitive to small stress variations, could be used to monitor fault-zone processes during large earthquake cycles and aseismic processes before large earthquakes. In this study, we develop an algorithm for the automatic detection and location of tectonic tremor beneath the southern Central Range of Taiwan and examine...
Growth strategies and threshold responses to water deficit modulate effects of warming on tree seedlings from forest to alpine
Brynne E. Lazarus, Cristina Castanha, Matthew J. Germino, Lara M. Kueppers, Andrew B. Moyes
2018, Journal of Ecology (106) 571-585
1.Predictions of upslope range shifts for tree species with warming are based on assumptions of moisture stress at lower elevation limits and low temperature stress at high elevation limits. However, recent studies have shown that warming can reduce tree seedling establishment across the entire gradient from subalpine forest to alpine...
An empirical perspective for understanding climate change impacts in Switzerland
Paul D. Henne, Moritz Bigalke, Ulf Buntgen, Daniele Colombaroli, Marco Conedera, Urs Feller, David Frank, Jurg Fuhrer, Martin Grosjean, Oliver Heiri, Jurg Luterbacher, Adrien Mestrot, Andreas Rigling, Ole Rossler, Christian Rohr, This Rutishauser, Margit Schwikowski, Andreas Stampfli, Sonke Szidat, Jean-Paul Theurillat, Rolf Weingartner, Wolfgan Wilcke, Willy Tinner
2018, Regional Environmental Change (18) 205-221
Planning for the future requires a detailed understanding of how climate change affects a wide range of systems at spatial scales that are relevant to humans. Understanding of climate change impacts can be gained from observational and reconstruction approaches and from numerical models that apply existing knowledge to climate change...
Reclamation after oil and gas development does not speed up succession or plant community recovery in big sagebrush ecosystems in Wyoming
Caitlin M. Rottler, Ingrid C. Burke, Kyle A. Palmquist, John B. Bradford, William K. Lauenroth
2018, Restoration Ecology (26) 114-123
Article for intended outlet: Restoration Ecology. Abstract: Reclamation is an application of treatment(s) following a disturbance to promote succession and accelerate the return of target conditions. Previous studies have framed reclamation in the context of succession by studying its effectiveness in re-establishing late-successional plant communities. Re-establishment of these plant communities...
Used-habitat calibration plots: A new procedure for validating species distribution, resource selection, and step-selection models
John R. Fieberg, James D. Forester, Garrett M. Street, Douglas H. Johnson, Althea A. ArchMiller, Jason Matthiopoulos
2018, Ecography (41) 737-752
“Species distribution modeling” was recently ranked as one of the top five “research fronts” in ecology and the environmental sciences by ISI's Essential Science Indicators (Renner and Warton 2013), reflecting the importance of predicting how species distributions will respond to anthropogenic change. Unfortunately, species distribution models (SDMs) often perform poorly...
Evaluating stocking efficacy in an ecosystem undergoing oligotrophication
Yu-Chun Kao, Mark W. Rogers, David B. Bunnell
2018, Ecosystems (21) 600-618
Oligotrophication has negatively affected fisheries production in many freshwater ecosystems and could conceivably reduce the efficacy of stockings used to enhance fisheries. In Lake Michigan, offshore oligotrophication has occurred since the 1970s, owing to reductions in total phosphorus (TP) inputs and nearshore sequestration of TP by nonindigenous dreissenid mussels. We...
The influence of data characteristics on detecting wetland/stream surface-water connections in the Delmarva Peninsula, Maryland and Delaware
Melanie K. Vanderhoof, Hayley Distler, Megan W. Lang, Laurie C. Alexander
2018, Wetlands Ecology and Management (26) 63-86
The dependence of downstream waters on upstream ecosystems necessitates an improved understanding of watershed-scale hydrological interactions including connections between wetlands and streams. An evaluation of such connections is challenging when, (1) accurate and complete datasets of wetland and stream locations are often not available and (2) natural variability in surface-water...
Shaler: in situ analysis of a fluvial sedimentary deposit on Mars
Lauren A. Edgar, Sanjeev Gupta, David M. Rubin, Kevin W. Lewis, Gary A. Kocurek, Ryan B. Anderson, James F. Bell III, Gilles Dromart, Kenneth S. Edgett, John P. Grotzinger, Craig Hardgrove, Linda C. Kah, Richard A. LeVeille, Michael C. Malin, Nicholas Mangold, Ralph E. Milliken, Michelle Minitti, Marisa C. Palucis, Melissa Rice, Scott K. Rowland, Juergen Schieber, Kathryn M. Stack, Dawn Y. Sumner, Roger C. Wiens, Rebecca M.E. Williams, Amy J. Williams
2018, Sedimentology (65) 96-122
This paper characterizes the detailed sedimentology of a fluvial sandbody on Mars for the first time and interprets its depositional processes and palaeoenvironmental setting. Despite numerous orbital observations of fluvial landforms on the surface of Mars, ground-based characterization of the sedimentology of such fluvial deposits has not previously been possible....
Repeated drought alters resistance of seed bank regeneration in baldcypress swamps of North America
Ting Lei, Beth A. Middleton
2018, Ecosystems (21) 190-201
Recurring drying and wetting events are likely to increase in frequency and intensity in predicted future droughts in the central USA and alter the regeneration potential of species. We explored the resistance of seed banks to successive droughts in 53 sites across the nine locations in baldcypress swamps in the...
Defining and classifying migratory habitats as sources and sinks: The migratory pathway approach
Richard A. Erickson, James E. Diffendorfer, Ryan Norris, Joanna A. Bieri, Julia Earl, Paula Federico, John Fryxell, Kevin Long, Brady J. Mattsson, Christine Sample, Ruscena Wiederholt, Wayne E. Thogmartin
2018, Journal of Applied Ecology (55) 108-117
Understanding and conserving migratory species requires a method for characterizing the seasonal flow of animals among habitats. Source-sink theory describes the metapopulation dynamics of species by classifying habitats as population sources (i.e. net contributors) or sinks (i.e. net substractors). Migratory species may have non-breeding habitats important to the species...
Depletion mapping and constrained optimization to support managing groundwater extraction
Michael N. Fienen, Kenneth R. Bradbury, Maribeth Kniffin, Paul M. Barlow
2018, Groundwater (56) 18-31
Groundwater models often serve as management tools to evaluate competing water uses including ecosystems, irrigated agriculture, industry, municipal supply, and others. Depletion potential mapping—showing the model-calculated potential impacts that wells have on stream baseflow—can form the basis for multiple potential management approaches in an oversubscribed basin. Specific management approaches can...
