Night is an extraordinary resource. Unlike air, water, or soil, nighttime is a spatio-temporal phenomenon, which leads to many crucial roles. It provides refuge to wildlife species, triggers hormonal and behavioral responses among a wide variety of organisms, and serves as an essential migratory backdrop for species that navigate by...
Cross-seasonal effects, where conditions in one season can have consequences in a following season, can have population-level implications for migratory species. To assess the presence of cross-seasonal effects on a migratory dabbling duck population, we examined the relative importance of habitat conditions in multiple seasons on the subsequent productivity of...
The conservation of declining desert fish species requires the identification of relations between fish population dynamics and their environments. Dynamic occupancy modeling, an approach that requires less information than traditional mark-recapture studies, may help identify important factors affecting population processes and aid desert fish conservation and restoration efforts. I used...
Each chapter in this expository paper considers a mathematical model of an aspect of animal behavior, and how it affects the patterns of movement across and within a landscape. These models are all directly or indirectly related to questions in either Behavioral Ecology or Landscape Ecology, or both. I first...
This thesis focuses on the nesting ecology and marine space use of Marbled Murrelets (Brachyramphus marmoratus) during the 2007 and 2008 nesting seasons in and around Port Snettisham, a remote mainland fjord in Southeast Alaska. Marbled Murrelets (murrelets) are a declining species throughout most of their range, and their conservation...
The Pigeon Guillemot (Cepphus columba) is now the only species of marine bird in Prince William Sound (PWS), Alaska that is listed as "not recovering" on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) Trustee Council's Injured Resources List and has shown no sign of population recovery. During the 20 years since...
Plant-pollinator mutualisms are one of the most prevalent and economically important mutualisms in nature. Like many other ecological systems, plant-pollinator communities are threatened by anthropogenic activity, both directly (e.g., habitat conversion and fragmentation) and indirectly (e.g., climate change). While we are aware of many of the activities that adversely impact...
Columbian black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) are important economically, ecologically, and culturally as an indigenous species in western Oregon. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) observed declines in black-tailed deer populations since the late 1980’s and attributes these declines to reduction in quality and availability of habitat, following the...
Forecasts of the impacts of climate change have traditionally focused on individual species and their phenotypes, phenology, or distribution. However, shifts in species distributions and the resulting reorganization of community composition represent an important violation to the assumption of species acting in isolation. Whereas species may respond individualistically to climate...
Many problems in ecology and conservation biology can be formulated and solved using machine learning algorithms for multi-label classification. This dissertation addresses three topics related to predicting the distributions of multiple species. It improves existing methods and proposes a new modeling paradigm to address the multi-species, multi-label problem. The first...