The black-footed ferret is a meso-predator within the Great Plains region of North America. Before the 1900s, black-footed ferret populations were self-sustaining in large ecological patches throughout the geographical range of the Great Plains. During the 1900s, various factors such as the systematic extermination of prairie dogs (the primary food...
The Northern Rubber Boa (Charina bottae) is a small, secretive boa native to the Pacific Northwest. Despite this being possibly the highest latitude boas and one of only two boas native to the continental U.S., it has received surprisingly little attention. Most of the research on the natural history of...
Agrivoltaic systems combine solar energy and agriculture, promoting dual land use. Although grazing sheep in these systems is common, research on intentionally designed pastures to increase production is lacking. This study seeks to compare the herbage growth and lamb production in simple, diverse, and legume pastures in an agrivoltaic system...
The following taxonomic keys are adapted in part from the subgeneric and species descriptions and keys produced by McGinley (2003), Gibbs et al. (2013) and Gardner and Gibbs (2022). Additional identification information was provided by Jason Gibbs, Thilina Hettiarachchi (University of Manitoba), and Joel Gardner (Washington State University). While these...
Research on community forests, primarily governed and managed by local forest users, in the United States is limited, despite their growth in numbers over the past decade. We conducted a survey to inventory CFs in the U.S., and better understand their ownership and governance structures, management objectives, benefits, and financing....
White rot, caused by Sclerotium cepivorum, is a serious disease that causes significant yield losses in Allium production. The pathogen persists in soil as sclerotia, which germinate in response to sulfur compounds in Allium root exudates. This study was aimed at investigating the potential of early-terminated Allium bait crops to...
Geospatial data analysis is a multifaceted discipline encompassing the collection, processing, and visualization of diverse datasets. It models and delineates the interactions of people, objects, and phenomena within geographical spaces and predicts patterns based on the relationships between different locations. Despite significant advancements in geospatial data engineering and analytics over...
Over recent decades, the Bering Sea has experienced oceanic and atmospheric
climate extremes, including record warm ocean temperature anomalies and marine heatwaves (MHWs), and increasingly variable air-sea heat fluxes. In this work, we assess the relative roles of surface forcing and ocean dynamical processes on mixed layer temperature (MLT) tendency...
Although newly independent Central Asian states in 1991, including Kyrgyzstan, started developing their own foreign water policies, Kyrgyzstan’s independence period demonstrated the challenges of determining foreign water policy independently. The conceptual framework of a two-level game was applied in the study to understand and answer the question about how domestic...
This capstone study reports on global warming-induced changes to the Colorado subalpine zone climate and disturbance regimes. It assesses the impacts of these changes upon the dominant subalpine tree species and summarizes future species distribution modeling for these and other nearby species potentially suitable for the future subalpine zone in...