Publications

Hurricane Dorian tracked immediately offshore of Cape Lookout National Seashore (which includes the barrier islands of North and South Core Banks) and Ocracoke Island after devastating the Bahamas in early September, 2019. Dorian briefly made landfall at Cape Hatteras as a Category 1 hurricane on September 6 before moving northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. Winds on the Outer Banks, initially more

Urbanization degrades stream ecosystems and causes loss of bodiversity. Using benthic macroinvertebrates as a surragate for overall aquatic diversity, we conducted a series of analytical approaches to derive management thresholds of urban development designed to link ecological responses to the primary management goal of protecting aquatic diversity in streams within the Delaware Water Gap Nationa

Determining hydrologic conditions prior to instrumental records is a challenge for restoration of freshwater ecosystems worldwide. Paleoecologic data provide this information on past conditions and when these data are used to adjust hydrologic models, allow conditions to be hindcast that may not be directly estimated from the paleo-data alone. In this context, the paleo-data provide real-world es

Assessing wetland vulnerability to chronic and episodic physical drivers is fundamental for establishing restoration priorities. We synthesized multiple data sets from E.B Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey, to establish a wetland vulnerability metric that integrates a range of physical processes, regulatory information and physical/biophysical features. The geospatial data are based on

Human-use pharmaceuticals in urban streams link aquatic-ecosystem health to human health. Pharmaceutical mixtures have been widely reported in larger streams due to historical emphasis on wastewater-treatment plant (WWTP) sources, with limited investigation of pharmaceutical exposures and potential effects in smaller headwater streams. In 2014–2017, the United States Geological Survey measured 111

Exploration of water resources is needed for public supply, extraction of mineral resources, and economic development in Afghanistan. Remotely-sensed data are useful for identifying the general nature of surface sediments, however, “boots on the ground” geophysical surveys or drilling programs are needed to quantify the thickness of sediments or aquifers. The nature of such investigations presents

Constructed oyster reefs (CORs) provide shore protections and habitats for fish and shellfish communities via wave energy attenuation. However, the processes and mechanism of CORs on wave attenuation remain unclear, thus limiting the effective assessment of CORs for shoreline protection. This paper presents results of a field investigation on wave characteristics and wave spectral variations along

Seagrass provides a wide range of economically and ecologically valuable ecosystem services, with shoreline erosion control often listed as a key service, but can also alter the sediment dynamics and waves within back-barrier bays. Here we incorporate seagrass dynamics into an existing barrier-marsh exploratory model, GEOMBEST++, to examine the coupled interactions of the back-barrier bay with bot

Salt marsh assessments focus on vertical metrics such as accretion or lateral metrics such as open-water conversion, without exploration of how the dimensions are related. We exploited a novel geospatial dataset to explore how elevation is related to the unvegetated-vegetated marsh ratio (UVVR), a lateral metric, across individual marsh “units” within four estuarine-marsh systems. We find that ele

Pesticides coated to the seed surface potentially pose an ecological risk to granivorous birds that consume incompletely buried or spilled seeds. To assess the toxicokinetics of seeds treated with current-use fungicides, Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) were orally dosed with commercially coated wheat seeds. Quail were exposed to metalaxyl, tebuconazole, and fludioxonil at either a low (0.07, 0.

We mapped tidal wetland gross primary production (GPP) with unprecedented detail for multiple wetland types across the continental United States (CONUS) at 16‐day intervals for the years 2000–2019. To accomplish this task, we developed the spatially explicit Blue Carbon (BC) model, which combined tidal wetland cover and field‐based eddy covariance tower data into a single Bayesian framework, and u

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