Investigation into how animals move within the landscape is important for both understanding of ecological processes and conservation management. Animal movement is important in shaping life history transitions, demographics, individual fitness, and species distributions. However, as landscapes become increasingly affected by human activities, movement becomes important as species navigate landscapes...
A fundamental objective of ecology and population biology is to identify factors that drive population dynamics and determine the population-level consequences of their interaction with the environment. Studies of reproductive performance can illuminate population dynamic processes, including the links between organismal biology, the environment, and life history theory. A central...
Fundamental objectives in the field of conservation biology involve understanding the processes that influence small and declining populations and applying that knowledge to develop appropriate monitoring strategies and targeted management and conservation actions. Critical first steps in determining the relative role of factors that drive population declines involves estimation of...
Management goals for restoring populations of the federally-threatened northern spotted owl currently include experimental lethal removals of barred owls from demographic study areas within the overlapping ranges of the two species to examine northern spotted owl population response. As lethal removals of a bird species are time- and cost-intensive, predictive...
Emerging infectious diseases impact both human and wildlife populations. Infectious agents, in particular the aquatic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid), have an influential role in driving global amphibian population declines. The emergence of the chytrid fungus has aspects of both geographic spread as well as climate shifts altering environmental conditions and...
Understanding how wetland birds use habitat is pivotal to developing successful and
beneficial conservation strategies. Although it has been an ardent topic in forest
research for some time, how species interact with the spatial patterning of habitat
across a landscape (i.e., landscape structure) has been more or less neglected in...
Deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems remain a frontier in marine science. Essential to their role in the ocean ecosystem are endosymbiotic bacteria which support larger megafauna, including the widespread symbiont-bearing Vesicomyid clams. The diversity and characteristics of these symbionts in these clams is only just beginning to be understood with technological advances...
Habitat loss and fragmentation are the greatest threats to biodiversity worldwide. Fragmentation impacts landscape configuration, resulting in a larger number of patches that are smaller in size and further apart from one another. Island biogeography and metapopulation theory predict populations in these remnant patches should be smaller, have higher extinction...
Coastal multi-hazards, i.e., earthquakes followed by tsunamis, induce severe damage to coastal infrastructure. The multi-hazards can cause soil liquefaction, which is one of the major concerns for evaluating sediments transport potential and structure failure mechanisms. The objectives for this work is threefold. First, to build and validate a soil numerical...
Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) face numerous challenges associated with climate change. Most research has emphasized the potential effects of elevated summer water temperatures; however, climatic changes are also projected to significantly alter incubation and rearing habitats during the late autumn, winter, and spring months ("the incubation period"). Along the southern...