Publications

Wildlife and human health are at risk of lead exposure from spent hunting ammunition. Lead exposure persists for bald eagles due to bullet fragments in game animal gut piles and unretrieved carcasses, and is also a human health risk when wild game is procured using lead ammunition. Programs encouraging the voluntary use of nonlead ammunition have become a popular approach mitigating these effects.

Parents faced with a predator must choose between their own safety versus taking care of their offspring. Each choice can have fitness costs. Life-history theory predicts that longer-lived species should be less willing than shorter-lived species to return to care for their offspring after a predator disturbance because they have more opportunities to reproduce in the future. We increased adult pr

The Prairie Chub Macrhybopsis australis is a poorly studied endemic cyprinid of the upper Red River basin and is listed as threatened in Texas and of greatest conservation need in Oklahoma. Hypothesized mechanisms have been proposed to explain the decline of pelagic broadcast spawning minnows including disrupted spawning cues, reduced recruitment, degraded habitat complexity, and reduced water ava

Bayesian models provide recursive inference naturally because they can formally reconcile new data and existing scientific information. However, popular use of Bayesian methods often avoids priors that are based on exact posterior distributions resulting from former studies. Two existing Recursive Bayesian methods are: Prior- and Proposal-Recursive Bayes. Prior-Recursive Bayes uses Bayesian updati

Mercury (Hg) bioaccumulates in aquatic ecosystems and may pose a risk to humans who consume fish. Selenium (Se) has the ability to reduce Hg toxicity, but the current guidance for human consumption of fish is based on Hg concentration alone. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between Se and Hg in freshwater sportfish, for which there is a paucity of existing data. We

Predator–prey interactions are among the most fundamental of ecological relationships. Recolonizing gray wolf (Canis lupus Linnaeus, 1758) populations present new challenges for wildlife management in multi-prey, multi-carnivore systems. We documented diet composition and kill rates for wolves in a recently recolonized area over winter and summer seasons (2014–2015). Elk (Cervus canadensis Erxlebe

Forests are often affected by management that could influence demographics of breeding and post-breeding birds that reside within. Numerous studies have focused on immediate effects from management on wildlife soon after forestry treatment (e.g., 0–5 years), however, fewer studies have examined changes in focal species abundance over longer durations as a forest regenerates after disturbance. We e

The recreational, tribal, and commercial importance of lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) has prompted interest in conducting large-scale telemetry studies to evaluate movement patterns, stock structure, and spatial distribution of fish relative to fishing effort in the Laurentian Great Lakes. However, there is a lack of knowledge concerning the postoperative effects of intracoelomic transmit

Habitat loss is a main contributor to fish fauna declines in the southwestern USA. Several studies have defined stream-specific habitat conditions that support the growth and survival of native fish in Arizona to inform stream restoration efforts, yet general habitat use of most individual species across the region is not established. Therefore, we evaluated habitat use of four native fishes, Spec

The northeastern and mid-Atlantic coasts of the United States are important summer maternity habitat and seasonal migratory corridors for many species of bats. Additionally, the effects of weather on bat activity are relatively unknown beyond coarse nightly scales. Using acoustic detectors, we assessed nightly and hourly activity patterns for eight species of bats over 21 consecutive months at Fir

Within-breeding season movements have not been quantified for Snowy Plovers (Charadrius nivosus) breeding on the Southern Great Plains (SGP), where suitable breeding habitat can range from less than 10 km to more than 600 km apart. This mosaic distribution of discrete patches of breeding habitat, combined with weather stochasticity and low densities of Snowy Plovers in Texas and New Mexico, increa

In the northern Gulf of Mexico, island restoration and creation have been used to mitigate potential negative effects of anthropogenic and environmental stressors to breeding seabirds. The long-term success of such projects can be enhanced when data are available to elucidate how site-specific and larger-scale factors may contribute to reproductive success. Nest-specific daily survival rate (DSR)