Publications
This list of publications includes peer-review journal articles, official USGS publications series, reports and more authored by scientists in the Ecosystems Mission Area. A database of all USGS publications, with advanced search features, can be accessed at the USGS Publications Warehouse.
Filter Total Items: 41763
Divergent, plausible, and relevant climate futures for near- and long-term resource planning
Scenario planning has emerged as a widely used planning process for resource management in situations of consequential, irreducible uncertainty. Because it explicitly incorporates uncertainty, scenario planning is regularly employed in climate change adaptation. An early and essential step in developing scenarios is identifying “climate futures”—descriptions of the physical attributes of plausible
Authors
David J. Lawrence, Amber N. Runyon, John E. Gross, Gregor W. Schuurman, Brian W. Miller
Wetland selection by female Ring-Necked Ducks (Aythya collaris) in the Southern Atlantic Flyway
On the wintering grounds, wetland selection by waterfowl is influenced by spatiotemporal resource distribution. The ring-necked duck (Aythya collaris) winters in the southeastern United States where a disproportionate amount of Atlantic Flyway ring-necked duck harvest occurs. We quantified female ring-necked duck selection for wetland characteristics during and after the 2017–2018 and 2018–2019 wa
Authors
Tori D. Mezebish, Richard Chandler, Glenn H. Olsen, Michele Goodman, Frank C. Rohwer, Nicholas J. Meng, Mark D. McConnell
Merging empirical and mechanistic approaches to modeling aquatic visual foraging using a generalizable visual reaction distance model
Visual encounter distance models are important tools for predicting how light and water clarity mediate visual predator-prey interactions that affect the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems at multiple spatial, temporal, and organizational scales. The two main varieties of visual encounter distance models, mechanistic and empirical, are used for similar purposes but take fundamentally dif
Authors
Sean K. Rohan, David Beauchamp, Timothy E. Essington, Adam G. Hansen
Understanding the future of big sagebrush regeneration: challenges of projecting complex ecological processes
Regeneration is an essential demographic step that affects plant population persistence, recovery after disturbances, and potential migration to track suitable climate conditions. Challenges of restoring big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) after disturbances including fire-invasive annual grass interactions exemplify the need to understand the complex regeneration processes of this long-lived, wo
Authors
Daniel Rodolphe Schlaepfer, John B. Bradford, William K. Lauenroth, Robert K Shriver
Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units program—2020 Year in review
Established in 1935, the Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units program (CRU program) is a unique cooperative partnership among State fish and wildlife agencies, universities, the Wildlife Management Institute, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Designed to meet the scientific needs of natural resource management agencies and the necessity for trained
Authors
John D. Thompson, Donald E. Dennerline, Dawn E. Childs, Patrick G.R. Jodice
From drought to deluge: Spatiotemporal variation in migration routing, survival, travel time and floodplain use of an endangered migratory fish
We developed a novel statistical model to relate the daily survival and migration dynamics of an endangered anadromous fish to river flow and water temperature during both extreme drought and severe flooding in an intensively managed river system. Our Bayesian temporally stratified multistate mark recapture model integrates over unobserved travel times and route transitions to efficiently estimate
Authors
Dalton Hance, Russell Perry, Adam Pope, Arnold J. Ammann, Jason L. Hassrick, Gabriel S. Hansen
Quarterly wildlife mortality report July 2021
The USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) Quarterly Mortality Report provides brief summaries of epizootic mortality and morbidity events by quarter. The write-ups, highlighting epizootic events and other wildlife disease topics of interest, are published in the Wildlife Disease Association quarterly newsletter. A link is provided in this WDA newsletter to the Wildlife Health Information Sha
Authors
Bryan J. Richards, Anne Ballmann, Julia S. Lankton, Thierry M. Work, Jaimie L. Miller
Estimates of abundance and harvest rates of female black bears across a large spatial extent
American black bears (Ursus americanus) are an iconic wildlife species in the southern Appalachian highlands of the eastern United States and have increased in number and range since the early 1980s. Given an increasing number of human-bear conflicts in the region, many management agencies have liberalized harvest regulations to reduce bear populations to socially acceptable levels. Wildlife manag
Authors
Jacob Humm, Joseph D. Clark
Tandem field and laboratory approaches to quantify attenuation mechanisms of pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical transformation products in a wastewater effluent-dominated stream
Evolving complex mixtures of pharmaceuticals and transformation products in effluent-dominated streams pose potential impacts to aquatic species; thus, understanding the attenuation dynamics in the field and characterizing the prominent attenuation mechanisms of pharmaceuticals and their transformation products (TPs) is critical for hazard assessments. Herein, we determined the attenuation dynamic
Authors
Hui Zhi, Alyssa L Mianecki, Dana W. Kolpin, Rebecca D. Klaper, Luke R. Iwanowicz, Gregory H. LeFevre
Integrating telemetry data at several scales with spatial capture–recapture to improve density estimates
Accurate population estimates are essential for monitoring and managing wildlife populations. Mark–recapture sampling methods have regularly been used to estimate population parameters for rare and cryptic species, including the federally listed Mojave desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii); however, the methods employed are often plagued by violations of statistical assumptions, which have the pote
Authors
Corey I Mitchell, Kevin T. Shoemaker, Todd C. Esque, A. G. Vandergast, Steven J. Hromada, Kirsten E. Dutcher, Jill S. Heaton, Kenneth E. Nussear
Corticosterone mediates a growth-survival tradeoff for an amphibian exposed to increased salinity
Life-history tradeoffs are common across taxa, but growth-survival tradeoffs—usually enhancing survival at a cost to growth—are less frequently investigated. Increased salinity (NaCl) is a prevalent anthropogenic disturbance that may cause a growth-survival tradeoff for larval amphibians. Although physiological mechanisms mediating tradeoffs are seldom investigated, hormones are prime candidates.
Authors
BJ Tornabene, Blake R. Hossack, EJ Crespi, CW Breuner
Hawai‘i forest review: Synthesizing the ecology, evolution, and conservation of a model system
As the most remote archipelago in the world, the Hawaiian Islands are home to a highly endemic and disharmonic biota that has fascinated biologists for centuries. Forests are the dominant terrestrial biome in Hawai‘i, spanning complex, heterogeneous climates across substrates that vary tremendously in age, soil structure, and nutrient availability. Species richness is low in Hawaiian forests compa
Authors
Kasey Barton, Andrea Westerband, Rebecca Ostertag, Elizabeth Stacy, Kawika Winter, Don Drake, Lucas Fortini, Creighton M Litton, Susan Cordell, Paul Krushelnycky, Kapua Kawelo, Kealoha Feliciano, Gordon Bennett, Tiffany Knight