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...
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...
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...
Streams across the western United States are impaired from human alterations that have reduced freshwater habitat by simplifying channel complexity and disconnecting floodplains (Knox et al., 2022; Waples et al., 2008; Wohl, 2014). Climate change is likely to continue exacerbating these risks by warming summer surface stream temperatures (Crozier et...
Connectivity of fish populations is a crucial question for fisheries conservation and the development of spatial management plans. Both adult and larval movement define the extent and direction of ecological and evolutionary overlap between geographic regions and, therefore, how we define stocks for management purposes. Within that context, my work...
Annual rates of prespawn mortality (PSM) in adult Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) trapped and transported upstream of dams in the Willamette River basin are high (often >40%) and could limit the ability to restore natural populations of spring Chinook salmon if not reduced. Improvements at the U.S. Army Corps of...
Once abundant in their native range, Pacific salmon species (Oncorhynchus spp.) were widely distributed across the northern Pacific Rim from South Korea and Japan to the Sacramento River in California. Remaining populations are subject to population-level threats, including pathogens. The freshwater parasitic copepod Salmincola californiensis is associated with the reduced...
In recent years, there has been an increase in episodic coastal hypoxia along the mid to inner-shelf waters off the Oregon Coast. Wind-driven coastal upwelling events can exacerbate the magnitude of these hypoxic events, causing extremely hypoxic bottom water (<0.5ml l-1 dissolved oxygen) to move onshore towards the inner shelf....
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...
Decision-making is a highly complex process influenced by the values, attitudes, and cognitive biases of the decision-maker. The classical model of decision-making fails to fully incorporate how decisions are made in situations of uncertainty, where having complete knowledge of all possible outcomes and alternatives is not always possible. In highly...