Freshwater discharge from large rivers into the coastal ocean creates tidally-driven frontal systems
known to enhance mixing, primary production, and secondary production. Many authors suggest that
tidal plume fronts increase energy flow to fish-eating predators by attracting planktivorous fishes to feed
on plankton aggregated by the fronts. However, few studies...
Increasingly diverse interests in commercial and recreational use of marine resources are creating new challenges for coastal ocean management. One concern of increased offshore use and development off the Oregon coast is the potential impact on marine bird populations. We summarized the primary surveys of seabird breeding colonies and at-sea...
The Northern California Current (NCC) is a seasonally productive and open ecosystem. It is home to both a diverse endemic community and to seasonally transient species. Productivity and food web structure vary seasonally, interannually, and decadally due to variability in coastal upwelling, climate-scale physical processes, and the migratory species entering...
Faidherbia albida is a widely used tree species in sub-Saharan Africa, promoted for use in parkland agroforestry systems based on reduced competition with crops during the rainy season from its reverse leafing phenology and positive effect on soil fertility. Increases in growth and yield have been reported for crops such...
We used a combination of seabird data (both fishery-dependent and fishery-independent) and fishing-effort data to evaluate the relative fisheries risk of five west coast groundfish fisheries and oneshrimp fishery to black-footed (Phoebastria nigripes), short-tailed (P. albatrus) and Laysan albatrosses(P. immutabilis). To assess risk, an overlap index was derived as the...
The rapid decline of marine ecosystems worldwide and the failure of traditional single species management pushed for the development of ecosystem-based conservation measures such as marine protected areas (MPA) to slow the loss of marine biodiversity. One approach to MPA creation advocates targeting marine megafauna (e.g., marine mammals, seabirds, sharks,...
Two bloom-detection products were developed for the Oregon coast that describe the relative percent change observed between successive pairs of 8-day chlorophyll-a (CHL) and fluorescence line-height (FLH) products obtained from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Aqua spacecraft (MODIS-Aqua). The CHL[subscript dev] and FLH[subscript dev] products, respectively, were optimized...
Strawberry is one of four crops included in the USDA-NIFA Specialty Crop Research Initiative-funded RosBREED project along with apple, peach, and cherry. Phenotyping strawberry for specific horticultural and commercial traits is important to identify associations with genotypic marker(s). This process is the first step in translating genomic knowledge into enhanced...
Year-round habitat use of marine predators provides knowledge of important marine areas throughout different life stages. Large-scale, environmental variability, both in space and time, causes changes in the behavior and distribution of marine predators that are important to quantify for conservation. In the Northern California Current System (NCCS), common murres...
Double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) and Brandt’s cormorants (P. penicillatus) nest sympatrically in a large mixed-species colony on East Sand Island (ESI) in the Columbia River estuary. Ecological theory predicts that such morphologically similar species will partition prey resources when faced with resource limitations. During the summer of 2014, I investigated...