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Publications

Below is a list of available NOROCK peer reviewed and published science. If you are in search of a specific publication and cannot find it below or through a search, please contact twojtowicz@usgs.gov.

Filter Total Items: 1211

Status and conservation of Yellowstone cutthroat trout in the Greater Yellowstone Area

No abstract available.
Authors
Robert K. Al-Chokhachy, Bradley Shepard, Jason Burckhardt, Scott Opitz, Dan Garren, Todd M. Koel, Lee M. Nelson

Application of synthetic scenarios to address water resource concerns: A management-guided case study from the Upper Colorado River Basin

Water managers are increasingly interested in better understanding and planning for projected resource impacts from climate change. In this management-guided study, we use a very large suite of synthetic climate scenarios in a statistical modeling framework to simultaneously evaluate how (1) average temperature and precipitation changes, (2) initial basin conditions, and (3) temporal characteristi
Authors
Stephanie A. McAfee, Gregory T. Pederson, Connie A. Woodhouse, Gregory J. McCabe

Linking spring phenology with mechanistic models of host movement to predict disease transmission risk

Disease models typically focus on temporal dynamics of infection, while often neglecting environmental processes that determine host movement. In many systems, however, temporal disease dynamics may be slow compared to the scale at which environmental conditions alter host space-use and accelerate disease transmission.Using a mechanistic movement modelling approach, we made space-use predictions o
Authors
Jerod Merkle, Paul C. Cross, Brandon M. Scurlock, Eric Cole, Alyson B. Courtemanch, Sarah Dewey, Matthew J. Kauffman

Projected warming portends seasonal shifts of stream temperatures in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, USA and Canada

Climate warming is expected to increase stream temperatures in mountainous regions of western North America, yet the degree to which future climate change may influence seasonal patterns of stream temperature is uncertain. In this study, a spatially explicit statistical model framework was integrated with empirical stream temperature data (approximately four million bi-hourly recordings) and high-
Authors
Leslie A. Jones, Clint C. Muhlfeld, Lucy A. Marshall

A probe-based quantitative PCR assay for detecting Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae in fish tissue and environmental DNA water samples

A probe-based quantitative real-time PCR assay was developed to detect Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae, which causes proliferative kidney disease in salmonid fish, in kidney tissue and environmental DNA (eDNA) water samples. The limits of detection and quantification were 7 and 100 DNA copies for calibration standards and T. bryosalmonae was reliably detected down to 100 copies in tissue and eDNA sa
Authors
Patrick R. Hutchins, Adam J. Sepulveda, Renee Martin, Lacey Hopper

Pneumonia in bighorn sheep: Risk and resilience

Infectious disease was an important driver of historic declines and extirpations of bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) in North America and continues to impede population restoration and management. Domestic sheep have long been linked to pneumonia outbreaks in bighorn sheep and this association has now been confirmed in 13 captive commingling experiments. However, ecological and etiological complex
Authors
E. Frances Cassirer, Kezia R. Manlove, Emily S. Almberg, Pauline Kamath, Mike Cox, Peregrine L. Wolff, Annette Roug, Justin M. Shannon, Rusty Robinson, Richard B. Harris, Ben J. Gonzales, Raina K. Plowright, Peter J. Hudson, Paul C. Cross, Andrew Dobson, Thomas E. Besser

Novel application of explicit dynamics occupancy models to ongoing aquatic invasions

Identification of suitable habitats, where invasive species can establish, is an important step towards controlling their spread. Accurate identification is difficult for new or slow invaders because unoccupied habitats may be suitable, given enough time for dispersal, while occupied habitats may prove to be unsuitable for establishment.To identify the suitable habitat of a recent invader, I used
Authors
Adam Sepulveda

Potential paths for male-mediated gene flow to and from an isolated grizzly bear population

For several decades, grizzly bear populations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) have increased in numbers and range extent. The GYE population remains isolated and although effective population size has increased since the early 1980s, genetic connectivity between these populations remains a long-term management goal. With only ~110 km
Authors
Christopher P. Peck, Frank T. van Manen, Cecily M. Costello, Mark A. Haroldson, Lisa Landenburger, Lori L. Roberts, Daniel D. Bjornlie, Richard D. Mace

Guest editorial: Aquatic science in the Northwest

In recent years, Northwest Science has seen a significant increase in the number of submissions representing aquatic science. Our region is punctuated by aquatic systems. The current issue in particular, presents a number of new aquatic science contributions. Accordingly, Northwest Science invited the authors of this guest editorial to address the question, why is aquatic science so import
Authors
Adam J. Sepulveda, Andrew M. Ray

Statistical design and analysis for plant cover studies with multiple sources of observation errors

Effective wildlife habitat management and conservation requires understanding the factors influencing distribution and abundance of plant species. Field studies, however, have documented observation errors in visually estimated plant cover including measurements which differ from the true value (measurement error) and not observing a species that is present within a plot (detection error). Unlike
Authors
Wilson J. Wright, Kathryn M. Irvine, Jeffrey M . Warren, Jenny K. Barnett

Climate change and alpine stream biology: progress, challenges, and opportunities for the future

In alpine regions worldwide, climate change is dramatically altering ecosystems and affecting biodiversity in many ways. For streams, receding alpine glaciers and snowfields, paired with altered precipitation regimes, are driving shifts in hydrology, species distributions, basal resources, and threatening the very existence of some habitats and biota. Alpine streams harbour substantial species and
Authors
Scott Hotaling, Debra S. Finn, J. Joseph Giersch, David W. Weisrock, Dean Jacobsen

Spatially explicit population estimates for black bears based on cluster sampling

We estimated abundance and density of the 5 major black bear (Ursus americanus) subpopulations (i.e., Eglin, Apalachicola, Osceola, Ocala-St. Johns, Big Cypress) in Florida, USA with spatially explicit capture-mark-recapture (SCR) by extracting DNA from hair samples collected at barbed-wire hair sampling sites. We employed a clustered sampling configuration with sampling sites arranged in 3 × 3 cl
Authors
J. Humm, J. Walter McCown, B.K. Scheick, Joseph D. Clark