Publications

Invasive species are a leading driver of global change, with consequences for biodiversity and society. Because of extraordinary rates of endemism, introduction, and extinction, Hawaii offers a rich platform for exploring the cross-disciplinary challenges of managing invasive species in a dynamic world. We highlight key successes and shortcomings to share lessons learned and inspire innovation and

Blue oak woodlands in California have been a focus of conservation concern for many years. Numerous studies have found that existing seedling and sapling numbers are inadequate to sustain current populations, and recent work has suggested that blue oak woodlands might be particularly vulnerable to a warming climate. California has recently experienced a drought of historically unprecedented severi

Fire is a critical ecosystem process that has played a key role in shaping forests throughout the Beartooth Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. The highly variable topography of the area provides ideal conditions to compare fire regimes across contiguous forest types, yet pyro-dendrochronological research in this area is limited. We reconstructed fire frequency, tree age structure, and post-fire tr

The genus Corbicula contains one of the most common and successful aquatic invasive species to North America. Prior to 2015 two predominant species of Corbicula were known from the United States—C. fluminea and C. largillierti, referred to as Forms A and B, respectively. Form A has spread throughout most of the U.S., while Form B is mainly contained in the Midwest and southern U.S. In 2015 a novel

The geomorphological formation of the Baja California peninsula and the Gulf of California is a principal driver of diversification for the reptiles of North America’s warm deserts. The western banded gecko, Coleonyx variegatus, is distributed throughout the Mojave, Sonoran and Peninsular deserts. In this study we use multilocus sequence data to address deep phylogeographic structure within C. var

Globally temperature of marine environments is on the rise and temperature plays an important role in the life-history of reptiles. In this study, we examined the relationship between sea surface temperature and average date of hatching for American crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus) over a 37-year period at two nesting sites, Everglades National Park and Florida Power and Light Turkey Point Power Pla

Detection has been a long-standing challenge to monitoring populations of cryptic herpetofauna, which often have detection probabilities that are closer to zero than one. Burmese Pythons (Python bivittatus =Python molurus bivittatus), a recent invader in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem of Florida, are cryptic snakes that have long periods of inactivity. In addition, management actions such as rem

Habitat fragmentation can alter species distributions and lead to reduced diversity at multiple scales. Yet, the literature describing fragmentation effects on biodiversity patterns is contradictory and inconclusive, possibly because most studies fail to integrate spatial scale into experimental designs and statistical analyses. As a result, it is difficult to extrapolate the effects of fragmentat

Although hybrids between captive Accipiter species are known, and hybrids between wild Accipiter species in North America have long been suspected, none have been confirmed to date. However, in 2014, a hatching year Accipiter captured at Cape May, New Jersey, during fall migration, appeared intermediate in size and plumage between a Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) and a Cooper's Hawk (A. coo

Land‐use and climate change are significantly affecting stream ecosystems, yet understanding of their long‐term impacts is hindered by the few studies that have simultaneously investigated their interaction and high variability among future projections. We modeled possible effects of a suite of 2030, 2060, and 2090 land‐use and climate scenarios on the condition of 70,772 small streams in the Ches

For over two decades, genetic studies have been used to assist in the conservation and management of both Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) and Gunnison Sage-grouse (C. minimus), addressing a wide variety of topics including taxonomy, parentage, population connectivity, and demography. The field of conservation genetics has been transformed by dramatic improvements in sequencing tech

Transect surveys are frequently used to estimate distribution and abundance of species across a landscape, yet a proportion of individuals present will be missed because either they were out of view and unavailable for detection or they were available but not detected because the surveyors missed them. These situations lead to availability and perception bias, respectively, and can result in misle