Daniel H Monson, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Community composition, species abundance, and species distribution are expected to change while monitoring ecosystems over time, and effective management of natural resources requires understanding mechanisms contributing to change. Marine ecosystems in particular can be difficult to monitor, in part due to large, multidimensional spatial scales and complex dynamics. However, within the...

Rocky intertidal communities are structured by local environmental drivers, which can be dynamic, fluctuating on various temporal scales, or static and not greatly varying across years. We examined the role of six static drivers (distance to freshwater, tidewater glacial presence, wave exposure, fetch, beach slope, and substrate composition) on intertidal community structure across the...

Nearshore marine habitats, which represent the interface among air, land and sea, form a critical component of the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) ecosystem. As an interface, the nearshore facilitates transfer of water, nutrients and biota between terrestrial and oceanic systems, creating zones of high productivity. The nearshore provides a variety of ecosystem services, including (1) nursery...

Pacific blue mussels (Mytilus trossulus) are abundant and wide-spread primary consumers in the intertidal zone throughout the Gulf of Alaska (GOA). As a component of the Gulf Watch Alaska monitoring program, they represent a key member of intertidal communities and an important prey resource to a number of nearshore vertebrate predators. Our goal is to understand variation in abundance...

The assessment of population status is a central goal of applied wildlife research and essential to the field of wildlife conservation. “Population status” has a number of definitions, the most widely used having to do with the current trajectory of the population (i.e., growing, stable, or declining), or the probability of persistence (i.e., extinction risk), perhaps without any...

In March 1989, the T/V Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska and spilled an estimated 42 million liters of crude oil (Wolfe et al. 1994). This oil subsequently spread over more than 26,000 km2 of water surface in PWS and the Gulf of Alaska and landed on more than 1000 km of shoreline (Spies et al. 1996, Short et al. 2004; see Fig. 1 in Esler et al., this report)...