Intrinsic and extrinsic factors affect vital rates and population-level processes, and understanding these factors is paramount to devising successful management plans for wildlife species. For example, birds time migration in response, in part, to local and broadscale climate fluctuations to initiate breeding upon arrival to nesting territories, and prolonged inclement...
Ontogenetic changes in resource use often delimit transitions between life stages. Ecological and individual factors can cause variation in the timing and consistency of these transitions, ultimately affecting community and population dynamics through changes in growth and survival. Therefore, it is important to document and understand behavioral and life history...
Many wind-power facilities in the United States have established effective monitoring programs to determine turbine-caused fatality rates of birds and bats, but estimating the number of fatalities of rare species poses special difficulties. The loss of even small numbers of individuals may adversely affect fragile populations, but typically, few (if...
Winter climate is expected to change under future climate scenarios, yet the majority of winter ecology research is focused in cold-climate ecosystems. In many temperate systems, it is unclear how winter climate relates to biotic responses during the growing season. The objective of this study was to examine how winter...
The sweet potato is one of the world’s most widely consumed crops, yet its evolutionary history is poorly understood. In this paper, we present a comprehensive phylogenetic study of all species closely related to the sweet potato and address several questions pertaining to the sweet potato that remained unanswered. Our...
Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the quick growth of the World Wide Web
(WWW) traffic raises the question of whether past Local Area Network (LAN) packet
traces still reflect the current situation or whether they have become obsolete. For this
thesis, several LAN packet traces were obtained by...
This dataset includes species richness of native plants, pollinators and birds as well as 13 proxies for ecosystem services representing timber production, culturally-valued plants and animals, and regulating services tied to forest productivity. The data were collected from an experiment conducted in the Oregon Coast Range USA that sought to...
By inverting EarthScope long-period magnetotelluric (MT) data from the southeastern United States (SEUS), we obtain electrical conductivity images that provides key insights into the geodynamics of this region. Significantly, we resolve a highly electrically resistive block that extends to mantle depths beneath the modern Piedmont and Coastal Plain physiographic provinces....
The integration of satellite image data with forest inventory plot data is a popular approach for mapping forest vegetation over large regions. Several methodological choices regarding spatial scale, mostly related to spatial resolution or grain, can profoundly influence forest maps developed from plot and imagery data. Yet often the consequences...
A change in climate is known to affect seasonal timing (phenology) of the life stages of poikilothermic organisms whose development depends on temperature. Less understood is the potential for even greater disruption to the life cycle when a phenology shift exposes photoperiod-sensitive life stages to new day lengths. We present...