Treesearch

Roads fragment animal populations, vehicles kill and injure animals, and traffic may affect animal behavior. Mitigation efforts (e.g., wildlife underpasses) are constructed to prevent fragmentation and reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. However, little is known about traffic’s proximal effects on wildlife behavior and use of mitigation measures. We quantified the time that elk (Cervus elaphus) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) allocated to foraging, vigilance, and flight behavior before and after vehicle passage. Both species increased vigilance and flight behaviors and...

Climate warming and altered disturbance regimes are changing forest composition and structure worldwide. Given that species often exhibit individualistic responses to change, making predictions about the cumulative effects of multiple stressors across environmental gradients is challenging, especially in diverse communities. For example, warming temperatures are predicted to drive species upslope, whereas fire exclusion promotes the expansion of species at lower elevations where fire was historically frequent. We resampled 148 vegetation plots to assess 46 years (1969–2015) of species and...

Quantifying historical patterns of fire regimes in peatlands can help contextualise current fire behaviour and aid in planning on ecosystem and landscape scales. However, current methods for detecting the evidence of past fires in peat soils are laborious or expensive. Our goal was to develop an effective and inexpensive method for detecting pyrogenic carbon (PyC) concentration in peat which could be used to estimate the occurrence of fires by analysis of discrete soil samples. We correlated diffuse reflectance Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) measurements of peat, and...

Eastern Red-backed Salamanders are a woodland species found primarily in northern Wisconsin, with isolated records from southeastern counties. This small slender salamander typically has a reddish dorsal stripe that extends from the head to the tail over a generally dark body, with light flecks on the belly, and five toes on the hind feet.

Snapping Turtles are the largest turtles found in Wisconsin. They can be identified by their large body, wide head (with hooked upper jaw), long thick legs and tail, and brown, tan, or olive-green coloration.

Residential yards are a significant component of urban socio-ecological systems; residential land covers 11% of the United States and is often the dominant land use within urban areas. Residential yards also play an important role in the sustainability of urban socio-ecological systems, affecting biogeochemical cycles, water and the climate via individual- and household-level behaviours. Spatial contagion has been observed in yard vegetation in several cities, potentially due to social norms that compel neighbours to emulate or conform to specific aesthetic qualities or management regimes....

Ziziphus mauritiana Lam. is a widespread shrub or tree of the Sahel region, where it grows wild and is used for various purposes, including nutrition, medicine, and firewood. Current domestication programs focus on using the local species as rootstock for the improved imported Asian cultivars to provide tolerance to pests and diseases. The plant plays an increasing economic role in the livelihoods of local Sahelian populations, but despite this there is little genetic information about it. The purpose of our study was to determine the genome size estimate and chromosome numbers of Z....

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the availability of consumer-grade hardware and software for three-dimensional (3D) object creation (Sargent and Schwartz 2019), reducing barriers for this technology to become widely used for education and research in the biological sciences. Digital 3D models can serve as educational tools for species identification training and can increase the value of museum specimens for research by providing remote access to view specimen characteristics, such as for morphometric studies (Falkingham et al. 2018; Irschick et al. 2020a;...

Although managing habitats in the context of climate change is increasingly important in Western North America, management recommendations are often lacking at fine scales relevant for management. Identifying management actions for climate adaptation requires an understanding of how wildlife (i) might vary in their response to habitat conditions across their range and (ii) the spatial scale of environmental effects. We quantified breeding habitat use of the Interior population of Band-tailed Pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata) in the Southwestern U.S. by analyzing data from satellite-tagged...

Predators are among the most threatened animal groups globally, with prey declines contributing to their endangerment. However, assessments of the habitat conditions that influence the successful capture of different prey species are rare, especially for small, cryptic predators. Accordingly, most predator conservation plans are based on the relative importance of habitats inferred from coarse-scale studies that do not consider habitat features contributing to hunting success, which can vary among prey species. To address this limitation, we integrated high-resolution global positioning...