Publications

Often, a decision maker is faced with a series of linked decisions, rather than an isolated one-off decision. In natural resource management, it is common to make a similar type of decision on a regular basis (e.g., annually). Such linked decisions have two important properties: they are dynamic, that is, the actions taken early on affect immediate outcomes as well as the effects of actions taken

With ongoing habitat loss and degradation, ever-increasing threats to biodiversity, and limited funding for conservation and management, nearly every natural resource manager routinely faces difficult resource allocation problems. Funding and capacity for natural resource management rarely meet the need, and informed resource allocations are increasingly important. These decision problems include

To be effective, managers of imperiled species must face the unavoidable tradeoff between conservation benefits and constrained budgets and must not be paralyzed by scientific uncertainty. Decision analysis can help meet these challenges when used to develop cost-effective strategies to recover or improve the status of species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, along with state partners, develop

The U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center’s Santa Cruz Field Station, Santa Cruz, California, has been funded by the U.S. Navy to continue monitoring a suite of intertidal black abalone sites at San Nicolas Island, California. The nine rocky intertidal sites were established in 1980 by Glenn VanBlaricom (then of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to study the potential impact

Hawai‘i’s high-elevation forests provide a critical refuge from disease for native forest birds. However, global warming is facilitating the encroachment of mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit into increasingly higher elevations of remaining refugia, threatening the viability of the forest birds across the islands. Multiple management actions to address the threat of disease have been propos

Coastal wetlands are rich and diverse ecosystems with a wide variety of birdlife and other natural resources. Decision making for coastal wetland management is difficult given the complex nature of these ecological systems and the frequent need to meet multiple objectives for varied resources. Management challenges in the coastal zone are exacerbated by uncertainty about sea level rise and impac

Indirect defence, the adaptive top‐down control of herbivores by plant traits that enhance predation, is a central component of plant–herbivore interactions. However, the scope of interactions that comprise indirect defence and associated ecological and evolutionary processes has not been clearly defined. We argue that the range of plant traits that mediate indirect defence is much greater than pr

Byrnes et al. (Geo-Marine Letters 39:265–278, Byrnes et al. 2019) present subsidence data for Barataria Basin located south and west of New Orleans in coastal Louisiana to better inform wetland protection and restoration planning by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. They measured subsidence using geodetic GPS elevation surveys of rod benchmarks, similar to the rod benchma

Phragmites australis subsp. australis is a cosmopolitan wetland grass that is invasive in many regions of the world, including North America, where it co-occurs with the closely related Phragmites australis subsp. americanus. Because the difference in invasive behavior is unlikely to be related to physiological differences, we hypothesize that interactions with unique members of their microbiomes

Climate change is shifting both the habitat suitability and the timing of critical biological events, such as flowering and fruiting, for plant species across the globe. Here, we ask how both the distribution and phenology of three food-producing shrubs native to northwestern North America might shift as the climate changes. To address this question, we compared gridded climate data with species l

The vertical structure and composition of vegetation can influence the quantity and quality of potential nesting sites for birds. Interspecific competition for high-quality nesting habitat may force some individuals into suboptimal habitat and lead to reduced reproductive success, eventually leading to changes in distribution or abundance. Large climate-mediated shifts in vegetation, including the

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has triggered efforts by multiple modeling groups to forecast disease trajectory, assess interventions, and improve understanding of the pathogen. Such models can often differ substantially in their projections and recommendations, reflecting different policy assumptions and objectives, as well as scientific, logistical, and other uncertainty about