The California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME), located on the eastern boundary of the North Pacific Ocean, is highly dynamic, with variable conditions driven by seasonal upwelling, regional oceanography, and broad scale climate patterns. In the last decade, the northeast Pacific Ocean has experienced several marine heatwaves (MHWs), prolonged periods...
Devaleraea mollis (Pacific Dulse) is becoming a popular food for human consumption. Previously, Pacific Dulse has been used as a nutrient source for cultured abalone species, with some historical food use by indigenous peoples, while the closely related Atlantic dulse (Palmaria palmata) has a long-documented history of use in cuisine...
It is well documented that microplastics and semi-synthetic particles (<5 mm) pervade the marine environment, with their ingestion by marine fauna eliciting global concern. While fishes exposed to microparticles in a laboratory setting have exhibited both sub-lethal and lethal effects, the diversity in material, morphology, and size of these contaminants...
Our understanding of seasonally disconnected floodplains and how they function to support rearing salmonids in the Pacific Northwest is limited. Past studies have found that these dynamic habitats may provide high-risk, high-reward trade-offs for rearing fish. High prey densities and optimal temperatures allow for accelerated growth, but low water levels...
Food webs are fundamental in ecology, as they offer a way to better understand the interrelatedness, connectivity, and complexity within a given ecosystem. The use of network analysis to model food webs can provide insights about the importance of physical templates on the organization of biological systems in streams using...
Headwater streams in the Oregon Coastal Range are subject to drastic fluctuations in flow and temperature because of the changing seasonality of a Mediterranean climate. In response to these changes, stream fishes exhibit a variety of movement patterns. Coastal Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii) have evolved an assortment of life...
The introduction of non-native species can negatively impact native species through reduced genetic fitness resulting from hybridization. The lack of spatiotemporal data of hybrids occurrences makes assessing hybridization risk difficult. Here, I developed a spatially-explicit GIS Hybridization Risk Model (HRM) between native ESA-listed Bull Trout and introduced Brook Trout by...
Microplastics are ubiquitous in our oceans, yet we are still clarifying what risks they pose to marine organisms, which can be challenging due to their trait diversity and spatial patchiness. Laboratory-based studies assessing risk demonstrate that many marine animals internalize microplastics, either actively through ingestion or passively via respiration. However,...
Climate change is a global phenomenon, but natural selection occurs within landscapes. A central tenet of landscape ecology is that mobile species depend on complementary habitats, which are insufficient in isolation, but combine to support animals through the full annual cycle. For coldwater fishes, it is widely assumed that maximum...
Microplastics (<5mm diameter) are present in a considerable number of marine and aquatic species. Understanding which species, the global spatial distribution, and what quantities of microplastics are present is extremely important for understanding the potential impacts they could have on recreationally important organisms and for the assessment of risk. We...