The Goose Lake Basin, situated on the border of Oregon and California, USA, faces significant challenges from drought, wildfire, and other environmental stressors. This region hosts numerous endemic fish species such as the Goose Lake redband trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberri), Goose Lake lamprey (Entosphenus sp.), Goose Lake tui chub (Siphateles...
Following European-American colonization of North America and associated landscape changes, barred owls (Strix varia) underwent a dramatic expansion of their historical range. The barred owl expanded across the previously tree-less Great Plains that had limited their distribution, and into the forests along the west coast. In these western forests they...
The greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus: hereafter; sage-grouse) population in Modoc County California is geographically isolated and has been subsidized by translocation to prevent inbreeding depression since 2005. Despite significant efforts to increase the population through translocations and habitat improvement by cutting encroaching western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis), only a single lek...
Sea otters act as valuable indicators of ecosystem health and consume prey items that contain anthropogenic microparticles, including microplastics. Microplastic ingestion can exert a wide range of deleterious effects depending on the organism and plastic type. We investigated the ingestion of microparticles by wild sea otters (Enhydra lutris) in Alaska...
North American bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) have experienced significant declines and population extirpations due to novel pathogens such as Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae. This disease continues to limit the population restoration of bighorn sheep. Therefore, understanding the demographic consequences of pathogen presence and the risk of contact between bighorn populations and potential...
Many research projects suffer from limited data causing poor statistical analysis or limited results. The movement to high throughput methods has been building for many years and cross many different disciplines. Lots of these methods start out using pathways that generate large amounts of data but have limited methods to...
The last century has experienced a marked increase in emerging infectious disease (EID, hereafter) – jeopardizing human, domestic animal, and wildlife health. EIDs are commonly associated with spillover from one host species into a novel host species, with many destructive diseases, for both livestock and wildlife, emerging at the wildlife-livestock...
In the western United States, bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) have suffered major die-offs in every state since the mid-1800s, and disease from domestic sheep (Ovis aries) has been a primary factor in these events. Beginning in the early 1900s, poly-factorial, poly-microbial pneumonia was identified as a major disease affecting bighorn...
Nearly all birds communicate through sound, and there has been much study of avian populations and communities using song and other vocalizations. Owls are no exception as they defend territories, advertise for mates, and defend against threats using various vocalizations. However, due to their generally nocturnal habits, some owl species...
The goal of my dissertation was to explore how scale influences stream restoration prioritization strategies for an anadromous species and identify influential uncertainties that exist at different scales. My objectives were to (1) produce a comprehensive review of the Chinook salmon management challenges in California’s Central Valley and identify the...