Publications

Unionid mussels are ecologically important and are globally imperiled. Toxicants contribute to mussel declines, and toxicity tests using juvenile mussels—a sensitive life stage—are valuable in determining thresholds used to set water quality criteria. In vitro culture methods provide an efficient way to propagate juveniles for toxicity testing, but their relative chemical sensitivity compared with

Ungulates typically migrate to maximize nutritional intake when forage varies seasonally. In western North America, however, increasing numbers of ungulates reside on low-elevation winter range year-round rather than migrating. These residents often occupy irrigated agricultural areas, but it is not known whether the nutrition provided by agricultural land exceeds that gained by migration. We eval

The Southern Great Plains has been altered by conversion of native grassland to row‐crop agriculture, which is considered the primary cause of declining lesser prairie‐chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) populations. However, recent analyses indicate that direct loss of grassland has slowed while lesser prairie‐chicken populations continue to decline, suggesting that remaining grasslands potentia

ivers and streams are highly vulnerable to fragmentation from roads due to their prevalence in the landscape. Road-stream crossings are far more numerous than other anthropogenic barriers such as dams; these crossing structures (culverts, bridges, fords, and tide gates) have been demonstrated to impede the passage of aquatic organisms. However, road-stream crossings vary widely in the extent to wh

The lesser prairie-chicken Tympanuchus pallidicinctus has experienced significant declines in distribution and abundance since the early 1900s. A severe and prolonged drought from 2009 to 2013 resulted in further declines in population numbers and despite improved environmental and habitat conditions since 2013, populations of lesser prairie chickens have shown little improvement. To investigate w

Environmental conditions can influence biological characteristics like phenology and body size with important consequences for organismal fitness. Examining these fitness consequences under natural conditions through genetic pedigree reconstruction offers a lens into potential population responses to changing environments. Over three years (2013-2015), we introduced adult alewife (Alosa pseudohare

In 2012, Minnesota’s first-ever regulated wolf hunting and trapping season occurred. Research has suggested that beliefs about risks and benefits associated with carnivores affect their acceptance. Using results from a 2013 mail survey of hunters and trappers who participated in the season, we employed mediation analysis to examine how risk- and benefit-based beliefs influenced the relationship be

Species vulnerability to climate change involves an interaction between the magnitude of change (exposure) and a species's tolerance to change. We evaluated fish species vulnerability to predicted stream temperature increases by examining warming tolerances across the Wyoming fish assemblage. Warming tolerance combines stream temperature with a thermal tolerance metric to estimate how much warming

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The cross‐scale resilience model suggests that system‐level ecological resilience emerges from the distribution of species’ functions within and across the spatial and temporal scales of a system. It has provided a quantitative method for calculating the resilience of a given system and so has been a valuable contribution to a largely qualitative field. As it is currently laid out, the model accou

Nutrient and energy flows across ecosystem boundaries subsidize recipient communities and influence bottom‐up processes in food webs. Migratory fish such as anadromous sea lamprey provide a pulse of marine‐derived nutrients and energy to Atlantic coastal streams in spring when organisms would otherwise be subject to limiting resources. We conducted sea lamprey carcass addition experiments to chara