Publications

The Going-to-the-Sun Road (GTSR) is the premier tourist attraction in Glacier National Park, Montana. The GTSR also traverses through and under 40 avalanche paths which pose a hazard to National Park Service (NPS) road crews during the annual spring snow plowing operation. Through a joint collaboration between the NPS and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a forecasting program primarily dealing w

Structure from Motion (SfM), a photogrammetric technique, has been used extensively and successfully in many fields including geosciences over the past few years to create 3D models and high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) from aerial or oblique photographs. SfM has recently been used in a limited capacity in snow avalanche research and shows promise as a tool for broader applications.

To investigate effects of headwater logging on downstream coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii) populations, we monitored stream habitat and biotic indicators including biomass, abundance, growth, movement, and survival over 8 years using a paired-watershed approach. Reference and logged catchments were located on private industrial forestland on ∼60-year harvest rotation. Five cl

Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental contexts. Here, we develop and test a conceptual model for how predictability of fire refugia varies according to topographic complexity and fire weath

Conservation biologists recognize that a system of isolated protected areas will be necessary but insufficient to meet biodiversity objectives. Current approaches to connecting core conservation areas through corridors consider optimal corridor placement based on a single optimization goal: commonly, maximizing the movement for a target species across a network of protected areas. We show that des

Evolutionary and ecological consequences of hybridization between native and invasive species are notoriously complicated because patterns of selection acting on non-native alleles can vary throughout the genome and across environments. Rapid advances in genomics now make it feasible to assess locus-specific and genome-wide patterns of natural selection acting on invasive introgression within and

Climate warming is causing rapid loss of glaciers and snowpack in mountainous regions worldwide. These changes are predicted to negatively impact the habitats of many range-restricted species, particularly endemic, mountaintop species dependent on the unique thermal and hydrologic conditions found only in glacier-fed and snowmelt-driven alpine streams. Though progress has been made, existing under

Climate change is an additional stressor in a complex suite of threats facing freshwater biodiversity, particularly for cold-water fishes. Research addressing the consequences of climate change on cold-water fish has generally focused on temperature limits defining spatial distributions, largely ignoring how climatic variation influences population dynamics in the context of other existing stresso

Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) are important tools to plan for and mitigate potential impacts of climate change. However, CCVAs often lack scientific rigor, which can ultimately lead to poor conservation prioritization and associated ecological and economic costs. We discuss the need to improve comparability and consistency of CCVAs and either validate their findings or improve a

Ecological abundance data are often recorded on an ordinal scale in which the lowest category represents species absence. One common example is when plant species cover is visually assessedwithin bounded quadrats and then assigned to pre-defined cover class categories.We present an ordinal beta hurdle model that directly models ordinal category probabilitieswith a biologically realistic beta-distr

Energy production in the Williston Basin, USA, results in the coproduction of highly saline, sodium chloride-dominated water (brine). The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) overlies the northeastern portion of the Williston Basin. Although PPR wetlands span a range of salinity, the dominant salt is sodium sulfate, and salinities are much lower than brine. Introduction of brine to wetlands can result in

Current range expansions of large terrestrial carnivores are occurring following human-induced range contraction. Contractions are often incomplete, leaving small remnant groups in refugia throughout the former range. Little is known about the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes that influence how remnant groups are affected during range expansion. We used data from a spatially explic