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Abstract (from Springer): Nursery habitats promote the survival of juveniles to the adult population and are often targeted by conservation policies and restoration practices. Managers must choose where to focus limited resources, which is complicated when juveniles utilize multiple habitats. This is particularly applicable to the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) population in North Carolina, USA, which uses three main habitats, low salinity ephemeral Ruppia maritima seagrass beds, high salinity mixed-species seagrass beds, and shallow marsh detrital habitat (SDH). Spatial variation in early juvenile blue crab density and size-class of blue crab instars (2.2–20 mm) was quantified within the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge (DDNWR) is located on Sanibel Island along the southwestern coast of Florida, USA. Sanibel Island is heavily developed, but DDNWR provides protection for a large mangrove area that supports biodiversity and recreational opportunity. However, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) eutrophication attributed to agriculture discharge along the Caloosahatchee River has affected the area’s aquatic habitat with algal blooms and may be causing untimely degradation of Sanibel’s mangrove forests. We launched a series of studies to understand how additional nutrient loading to the levels expected in the future might affect DDNWR’s mangrove resource. We experimentally fertilized selected...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management): The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is responsible for reviewing the biological status of hundreds of species to determine federal status designations under the Endangered Species Act. The longleaf pine Pinus palustris ecological system supports many priority at-risk species designated for review, including five species of herpetofauna: gopher tortoise Gopherus polyphemus, southern hognose snake Heterodon simus, Florida pine snake Pituophis melanoleucus mugitus, gopher frog Lithobates (Rana) capito, and striped newt Notophthalmus perstriatus. To inform status decisions and conservation planning, we developed habitat suitability models to 1) identify...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from USGS Publications Warehouse): The collective set of decisions involved with the restoration of degraded wetlands is often more complex than considering only ecological responses and outcomes. Restoration is commonly driven by a complex interaction of social, economic, and ecological factors representing the mandate of resource stewards and the values of stakeholders. The authors worked with the Herring River Restoration Committee (HRRC) to develop a decision framework to understand the implications of complex tradeoffs and to guide decision making for the restoration of the 1,100-acre Herring River estuary within Cape Cod National Seashore, which has been restricted from tidal influence for more than...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Water Resources Research): Large dams degrade the river’s health by heavily regulating the natural flows. Despite a long history of research on flow regulation due to dams, most studies focused only on the impact of a single dam and ignored the combined impact of flow regulation on a river network. We propose a new Dynamic Flow Alteration Index (DFAI) to quantify the local and cumulative degree of regulation by comparing the observed controlled flows with the naturalized flows based on a moving time horizon for the highly regulated Colorado River Basin. The proposed DFAI matches closely to dam’s localized regulation for headwater gages and starts to diverge as we move downstream due to increase in...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract Research that can improve the resilience of social and natural systems to climate change has become more common. Many climate adaptation science organizations and agencies now focus on actionable science, a model that aims to have greater impacts on policy and practice than traditionally produced and distributed science. However, evaluations of research projects are needed to examine and verify the impact of climate science on adaptation and society. Better understanding the types and mechanisms of impact will allow organizations to design, fund, and facilitate more useful climate adaptation science. Many existing actionable science evaluation approaches are qualitative in nature and take considerable...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from WileyOnline): Stakeholders fundamentally shape the success of wildlife management, yet little is known about how one of the most important stakeholder groups, wildlife agency decision makers, view emerging conservation challenges. Wildlife agency decision makers collectively shape how wildlife conservation unfolds in North America, but their perspectives are generally absent in the literature. Challenges including climate change, conservation funding models, and wildlife disease make understanding how wildlife decision makers view the future of wildlife conservation essential. We interviewed 48 directors and supervisory board members of wildlife agencies in the southeast United States from July 2019...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from WileyOnline): An inherent challenge in managing rare or cryptic species is data deficiency. For this reason, ancillary data is a potentially valuable resource for generating key population estimates for priority species. We compiled ancillary commensal data collected between 1982 and 2020 during surveys of gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) burrows to estimate the terrestrial distribution of gopher frogs (Rana capito) from potential breeding wetlands. Gopher frogs were detected in gopher tortoise burrows 30‒3,879 m from identified wetlands. A global model of all records from all sites indicated that the probability of a gopher frog residing in a gopher tortoise burrow declined with increasing distance...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Emydoidea blandingii (Holbrook, 1838; Blanding’s turtles) are a species of medium-sized, long-lived, semiaquatic, freshwater turtles with a wide distribution across the northern and eastern United States and southern Canada. They have an annual activity cycle consisting of late autumn and winter overwintering and spring emergence, spring movement and foraging, spring and summer nesting, and summer and autumn foraging and nonnesting movement. In response to changes in average and extreme temperatures, Blanding’s turtles are likely to experience increased physiological stress and reduced reproductive success. Variability in precipitation may affect the availability of freshwater habitats for overwintering, shelter,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from USGS): Adapting cultural resources to climate-change effects challenges traditional cultural resource decision making because some adaptation strategies can negatively affect the integrity of cultural resources. Yet, the inevitability of climate-change effects—even given the uncertain timing of those effects—necessitates that managers begin prioritizing resources for climate-change adaptation. Prioritization imposes an additional management challenge: managers must make difficult tradeoffs to achieve desired management outcomes related to maximizing the resource values. This report provides an overview of a pilot effort to integrate vulnerability (exposure and sensitivity), significance, and use potential...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Natural resource plans play a critical role in guiding the sustainable management of forest ecosystems. However, little is known about the quality of management plans. In this study, we evaluated and compared the quality of 35 management plans from federal, state, and nongovernment groups managing longleaf pine ecosystems in the Southeast United States. We developed a plan evaluation tool consisted of five components: (1) Problem and Objective Statement, (2) Fact Base, (3) Actions and Implementation, (4) Integration with Other Plans, and (5) Stakeholder Participation, to examine to what extent plans incorporated planning best practices. We tested a hypothetical model for understanding...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Climate change may induce mismatches between wildlife reproductive phenology and temporal occurrence of resources necessary for reproductive success. Verifying and elucidating the causal mechanisms behind potential mismatches requires large-scale, longer-duration data. We used eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) nesting data collected across the southeastern U.S. over eight years to investigate potential climatic drivers of variation in nest initiation dates. We investigated climactic relationships with two datasets, one inclusive of successful and unsuccessful nests (full dataset) and another of just successful nests (successfully hatched dataset), to determine whether...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Urbanization represents an unintentional global experiment that can provide insights into how species will respond and interact under future global change scenarios. Cities produce many conditions that are predicted to occur widely in the future, such as warmer temperatures, higher carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and exacerbated droughts. In using cities as surrogates for global change, it is challenging to disentangle climate variables—such as temperature—from co-occurring or confounding urban variables—such as impervious surface—and then to understand the interactive effects of multiple climate variables on both individual species and species interactions. However, such interactions are also difficult to replicate...
Abstract (from Wildlife Research): Designing effective long-term monitoring strategies is essential for managing wildlife populations. Implementing a cost-effective, practical monitoring program is especially challenging for widespread but locally rare species. Early successional habitat preferred by the New England cottontail (NEC) has become increasingly rare and fragmented, resulting in substantial declines from their peak distribution in the mid-1900s. The introduction of a possible competitor species, the eastern cottontail (EC), may also have played a role. Uncertainty surrounding how these factors have contributed to NEC declines has complicated management and necessitated development of an appropriate monitoring...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Landscape Ecology): Context Development and survival vary across a species’ geographic range and are also affected by local conditions like urban warming, which may drive changes in biology that magnify or reduce the risks of hazardous organisms to people. Larvae of the pine processionary moth (Thaumetopoea pityocampa Schiff; PPM) are covered with setae (hair-like structures) that cause allergic reactions in warm-blooded vertebrates upon contact with the skin, eyes, or respiratory tract. Objectives Our objective was to determine whether PPM larva development, phenology, and survival change with urban warming in ways that affect the risks of this organism to people. Methods In Orléans, France, we...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Summary (from NESP Methods Brief Series): This methods brief focuses on recreational birding, which is a popular activity in the United States. This analysis maps the location of recreational birding activity in the southeastern U.S. Regional priorities for conservation of birding areas are identified based on the total amount of birding activity and the proportion of birding activity that takes place on unprotected land. Spatial datasets for these priority areas and associated metrics are available on ScienceBase.
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Water Resources Research): Extreme floods, including those expected to become more frequent in a warming world, may impact nutrient metabolism in streams. However, flood impacts on spatial and temporal variability of nutrient dynamics on large rivers (e.g., fourth order and higher) have been understudied. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew provided a unique opportunity to evaluate nitrate retention and processing on the Lumbee River, a blackwater stream in southeastern North Carolina. The 3,000+ km2 watershed received as much as 400 mm of rain in 48 hr as the storm moved across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Resulting floods in the watershed were the largest on record, based on more than 80 years of continuous...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Journal of Ecology): Forest encroachment into savannas is a widespread phenomenon, the rate of which may depend on soil conditions, species composition or changes in stand structure. As savanna specialist trees are replaced by generalist species, rates of stand development may increase. Because generalists can persist in forests, they are likely to grow more quickly and survive longer in dense stands, compared to savanna specialists. Furthermore, the faster growth rates of generalists may allow them to overtop and outcompete savanna specialists, causing rapid species turnover. We measured growth and survival of 6,147 individuals of 112 species of savanna and generalist tree species over a period...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Sustainability): Growing evidence suggests that connection to nature may be linked to mental health and well-being. Behavioral changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic could negatively affect adolescents’ connection to nature, subsequently impacting health and well-being. We explored the relationship between connection to nature and well-being before and during the pandemic through a nationally representative survey of adolescents across the United States (n = 624) between April and June 2020. Survey items focused on connection to nature, mental well-being, and participation in outdoor activities before and during the pandemic. Paired-sample t-tests revealed declines in connection to nature,...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from Global Change Biology): Climate change is transforming ecosystems and affecting ecosystem goods and services. Along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts of the southeastern United States, the frequency and intensity of extreme freeze events greatly influence whether coastal wetlands are dominated by freeze-sensitive woody plants (mangrove forests) or freeze-tolerant grass-like plants (salt marshes). In response to warming winters, mangroves have been expanding and displacing salt marshes at varying degrees of severity in parts of north Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. As winter warming accelerates, mangrove range expansion is expected to increasingly modify wetland ecosystem structure and function....
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation