Treesearch

Roads fragment ecosystems around the globe, but the effects of this fragmentation on biodiversity remain poorly understood. Wolverines (Gulo gulo) are snow-dependent carnivores that occur at low densities and they exhibit low genetic diversity at the southern extent of their range where they are snow-limited and fragmented by human development. Therefore, understanding the effect of roads and transportation infrastructure on population connectivity in protected strongholds such as national parks is crucial to effective wolverine management in a changing climate. We assessed whether the...

Connecting forest management with the conservation of forest-associated animals requires an understanding of habitat quality, as well as identifying long-term silvicultural strategies that align with high quality habitat. It is, therefore, essential to characterize the spatio-temporal dimensions of habitat quality. Here, we leveraged multiple datasets to assess high quality habitat for female Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), a federally threatened forest carnivore in the contiguous U.S. Our datasets included a spatially extensive sample of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) collected in 2013...

A fundamental challenge in habitat ecology and management is understanding the mechanisms generating animal distributions. Studies of habitat selection provide a lens into such mechanisms, but are often limited by unrealistic assumptions. For example, most studies assume that habitat selection is constant with respect to the availability of resources, such that habitat use remains proportional to availability. To the contrary, a growing body of work has shown the fallacy of this assumption, indicating that animals modify their behavior depending on the context at broader scales. This has...

Given the uncertain population status of low-density, widely-occurring raptors, monitoring changes in abundance and distribution is critical to conserving populations. Nest-based monitoring is a common, useful approach, but the difficulty and expense of monitoring raptor nests and importance of reliable trend data to conservation requires that limited resources are allocated efficiently. Power analyses offer a helpful tool to ensure that monitoring programs have the ability to detect trends and to optimize financial resources devoted to monitoring. We evaluated alternative monitoring...

Respiration is as essential to plants as it is to animals. Because respiration increases exponentially in response to temperature in the short term, models predict that higher temperatures would lead to higher plant respiration losses, yielding less carbohydrate supply for growth and reproduction. Also because the short-term temperature response is exponential, respiration has been suggested as the cause of slower growth in warmer conditions in field studies (Clark et al., 2003). However, many studies have shown acclimation of respiration, where respiration rates of plant tissues at a...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a large reservoir of terrestrial carbon (C); it consists of different fractions of varying complexity and stability. Partitioning SOC into different pools of decomposability help better predict the trend of changes in SOC dynamics under climate change. Information on how physical fractions and chemical structures of SOC are related to climate and vegetation types is essential for spatial modelling of SOC processes and responses to global change factors.

Estimating population abundance of wolves (Canis lupus) in densely forested landscapes is challenging because reduced visibility lowers the success of methods such as aerial surveys and enumeration of group size using radiotelemetry. However, regular population estimates of wolves are necessary for population monitoring and sustainable management. We used noninvasive hair snaring and spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) to estimate wolf abundance on Prince of Wales Island (POW), Alaska, USA, during 2012-2015. We monitored 36-82 hair‐snare stations weekly for 9-11 weeks during...

Armillaria altimontana and A. solidipes frequently co-occur (McDonald et al. 2000) and are commonly found in association with western white pine (Pinus monticola). Armillaria solidipes (as A. ostoyae) is well-known as a virulent primary pathogen on diverse conifers within inland western regions of the contiguous USA (Lockman and Kearns 2016), whereas A. altimontana is considered to be a weak or secondary pathogen (Brazee et al. 2012). However, little has been documented about the impact of A. altimontana on tree health and growth.

We performed experiments in southwestern USA streams to evaluate the efficacy of environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling for two rare small-bodied minnows: Spikedace Meda fulgida and Loach Minnow Rhinichthys cobitis. We collected eDNA by filtering 5-L samples and compared detection sensitivity of eDNA assays to traditional sampling methods (electrofishing and seining) by using both techniques at 33 sites in seven streams. We used caged-fish experiments to estimate eDNA production rates, persistence, and travel distances and to estimate relationships between fish density, biomass, and eDNA...