Diet variation among individuals within populations is widespread. Often diet differences among individuals are attributable to obvious differences among individuals such as age, sex, or morphology. However, growing evidence suggests that individual diet variation is also common among seemingly identical individuals within populations. This phenomenon has been termed individual diet...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...
Although machine learning systems are often effective in real-world applications, there are situations in which they can be even better when provided with some degree of end user feedback. This is especially true when the machine learning system needs to customize itself to the end user's preferences, such as in...
Natural selection, in its most basic form, is described as a process in which traitsincrease or decrease in frequency depending on their fitness, and only the trait withthe highest fitness will remain in the population. Yet, populations rarely have asingle `optimal' trait. The way natural selection maintains this observed variationwithin...
One of the biggest hurdles for a juvenile salmonid (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is migrating downstream from freshwater spawning grounds to the ocean. Juveniles from wild broodstock were reared from the South Santiam River for more than 1 year at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center (OHRC) in Alsea, OR. The fish were...
The environmental movement needs people from communities of color and the differing perspectives they provide. Latinas/os are one of the largest communities of color in the US, and their numbers continue to grow. However, mainstream environmental organizations have failed to engage this community in authentic ways. The lack of meaningful...
Emerging infectious diseases impact both human and wildlife populations. Infectious agents, in particular the aquatic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid), have an influential role in driving global amphibian population declines. The emergence of the chytrid fungus has aspects of both geographic spread as well as climate shifts altering environmental conditions and...
Discussions around adapting water management systems to climate change often express the need to increase the flexibility and adaptive capacity of current systems, and to implement robust strategies going forth. While these topics lie at the center of many climate change discussions, transforming adaptation recommendations into tangible tools and information...
Although it is generally assumed that the intensifying abiotic environment is the primary effect of drought on aquatic organisms, drought-induced top predator extinctions may be an important underlying mechanism. I used manipulative experiments to disentangle the impacts of drying and top predator extinctions on arid-land aquatic invertebrate communities. I then...
Calls continually are made to provide economic assessments of research program achievements and efficiency. Yet little effort has been given to develop an assessment framework that would focus on the research discovery itself, treating the research manager as a producer and the research technology as a knowledge production function. The...