Conservation of natural resources has become a new watchword of the scientific community. While many terrestrial ecosystems are well protected, marine ecosystems have only recently come to the forefront. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been introduced as a means of protecting biodiversity, commercial stocks, and ecosystem services. There are many...
Coral reefs have become vulnerable to climate change, with mass bleaching events, the loss of symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae), increasing in both frequency and severity. As climate change continues to threaten the persistence and existence of coral reefs around the world, the biggest question posed for coral reefs is “can they...
Dislodged macroalgae and seagrasses, also known as marine wrack, frequently wash into coastal ecosystems from the ocean and are potentially important ecological resources for biological communities. These!nutrient and organic matter subsidies may be especially important on sandy beaches, where little in situ primary productivity exists for higher trophic levels. To...
The conservation of declining desert fish species requires the identification of relations between fish population dynamics and their environments. Dynamic occupancy modeling, an approach that requires less information than traditional mark-recapture studies, may help identify important factors affecting population processes and aid desert fish conservation and restoration efforts. I used...
This study investigated how a minority population of Latino/a immigrant children attending a middle school in the Pacific Northwest made sense of engaging with school and school mathematics. A cross disciplinary theoretical framework was used to examine how individual student motivation is impacted by the social context in which the...
Many marine fish populations are severely declining due to over-fishing, loss of both juvenile and adult habitats, and accelerating environmental degradation. Fisheries management and the implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs) and other conservation tools are currently hindered by large gaps in knowledge about larval dispersal and its subsequent effects...
Invasive species are a major threat to global biodiversity. Understanding the mechanisms underlying successful invasions is imperative for developing effective management strategies. Plasticity in physiological, morphological, and behavioral traits could be an indicator of invasion potential in non-native species. The invasive American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) has recently been observed breeding...
Tropical forest-to-agriculture conversions contribute to ~20% of contemporary global C emissions. Current global C flux estimates assume C is lost from vegetation and soils over time due to this conversion, and that C stocks in agricultural lands are fairly uniform across the tropics. Global C stock and flux estimates may...
Depletion-Based Stock Reduction Analysis (DB-SRA; Dick and MacCall, 2011) is a catch-only fisheries stock assessment model that has been developed to estimate an overfishing limit (OFL) in data-poor situations. DB-SRA projects the biomass trajectories of a stock by means of a catch time series and five parameters: the instantaneous, per...
Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, returning to the Yukon River basin and other large river systems in western Alaska have declined dramatically since the late 1990s. This continuing trend has raised concerns over the future status of the returns, and severely impacted commercial and subsistence fisheries within the drainage. Management is...