Gray wolves (Canis lupus) are the most socially polarizing species listed under the Endangered Species Act. Wildlife management practices at local, state, and federal levels include lethal control to resolve stakeholder and wolf conflicts as a last resort. There is little experimental evidence that lethal control is effective in this...
The Tam McArthur Rim is a volcanic center located within the Tumalo Volcanic Field (TVF), approximately 25 km west of Bend, OR. The rim comprises of shallowly dipping bedded sequences of intermediate and silicic flows with minor tephra interbedding capped by a rhyodacite dome. Glacial activity has exposed significant portions...
The City of Bend’s current urban forest management strategy consists of a series of city codes and ordinances, tree protection and planting standards, and two different plans created by the Bend Park and Recreation District. The analysis of these documents, as well as review of existing management approaches in Boise,...
Understanding the tradeoff between water use and productivity is critical for modeling growth of intensively managed Douglas-fir forests in the Pacific Northwest. Evapotranspiration is closely linked to carbon dioxide intake during the process of photosynthesis. However, summer drought characterizing the growing season in this region imposes a limit on carbon...
Continental flood basalts represent short-lived but immense blasts of mafic magma to the continental crust. The youngest and smallest continental flood basalt worldwide, the Columbia River Basalt, initiated with the eruption of the most mafic member, the Steens Basalt (~16.9 Ma). The Steens Basalt is exposed in southeast Oregon, southwest...
Stress, including extreme or rapidly changing temperatures, are known to have deleterious effects on fish health and physiology. This thesis examines the combined effects of elevated acclimation temperature and acute handling stress on the number of antibody producing cells, plasma lysozyme concentrations, and the number of pronephric leukocytes in juvenile...
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...
We develop the idea of risk transmission from large wildfires and apply network analyses to understand its importance on a 0.75 million ha US national forest. Wildfires in the western US frequently burn over long distances (e.g., 20-50 km) through highly fragmented landscapes with respect to ownership, fuels,
management intensity,...
According to the “social intelligence hypothesis,” species with complex social interactions have
more sophisticated communication systems. Giant otters (Pteronura brasiliensis) live in groups
with complex social interactions. It is likely that the vocal communication of giant otters is more
sophisticated than previous studies suggest. The objectives of the current study...
Although there are considerable site-based data for individual or groups of ecosystems, these datasets are widely scattered, have different data formats and conventions, and often have limited accessibility. At the broader scale, national datasets exist for a large number of geospatial features of land, water, and air that are needed...