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...
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...
One fundamental concern in conservation biology is species abundance. For many taxa, however, these data are costly to obtain via direct observation and thus limited in geographic or temporal scope. Very high-resolution satellite imagery provides a means to address these limitations and provide remotely-sensed counts of large, colonial species. We...
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...
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...
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 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...
The western purple martin (Progne subis arboricola) is a species of conservation concern throughout the Pacific Northwest. In western Oregon, the purple martin nests in three major ecosystem types: inland open-water, coastal, and upland forest. The availability of suitable breeding habitat is a major limiting factor for western purple martin...
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...
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...