Monitoring Animal Populations With Cameras Using Open, Multistate, N-Mixture Models.

Remote cameras have become a mainstream tool for studying wildlife populations. For species whose developmental stages or states are identifiable in photographs, there are opportunities for tracking population changes and estimating demographic rates. Recent developments in hierarchical models allow for the estimation of ecological states and rates over time for unmarked animals whose states are known.

Factors affecting the nesting success of Swainson's Thrush () along an elevational gradient.

Montane birds experience a range of challenges that may limit their breeding success, including nest predation and severe climactic conditions. The continuing effects of climate change are causing shifts in biotic and abiotic factors that may compound these threats to montane bird species. In northeastern montane forests, many bird species are shifting downslope, potentially as the result of increased precipitation and temperature at higher elevations.

Abundant, distinct, and seasonally dynamic bee community in the canopy-aerosphere interface above a temperate forest.

Our understanding of how bees (Apoidea) use temperate forests is largely limited to sampling the understory and forest floor. Studies over the last decade have demonstrated that bee communities are vertically stratified within forests, yet the ecology of bee assemblages immediately above the canopy, the canopy-aerosphere interface, remains unexplored. We sampled and compared bee communities above the canopy of a temperate forest to the understory (1 m), midstory (10 m), and canopy (20 m) on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States from April to August, 2021.

Life in the desert: The impact of geographic and environmental gradients on genetic diversity and population structure of .

For range-restricted species with disjunct populations, it is critical to characterize population genetic structure, gene flow, and factors that influence functional connectivity among populations in order to design effective conservation programs. In this study, we genotyped 314 individuals from 16 extant populations of , a United States federally threatened Great Basin Desert using six microsatellite loci. We assessed the effects of Euclidean distance, landscape features, and ecological dissimilarity on the pairwise genetic distance of the sampled populations, while also testing for a potential relationship between .

A local evaluation of the individual state-space to scale up Bayesian spatial capture-recapture.

Spatial capture-recapture models (SCR) are used to estimate animal density and to investigate a range of problems in spatial ecology that cannot be addressed with traditional nonspatial methods. Bayesian approaches in particular offer tremendous flexibility for SCR modeling. Increasingly, SCR data are being collected over very large spatial extents making analysis computational intensive, sometimes prohibitively so.

Using simulations to evaluate Mantel-based methods for assessing landscape resistance to gene flow.

Mantel-based tests have been the primary analytical methods for understanding how landscape features influence observed spatial genetic structure. Simulation studies examining Mantel-based approaches have highlighted major challenges associated with the use of such tests and fueled debate on when the Mantel test is appropriate for landscape genetics studies. We aim to provide some clarity in this debate using spatially explicit, individual-based, genetic simulations to examine the effects of the following on the performance of Mantel-based methods: (1) landscape configuration, (2) spatial genetic nonequilibrium, (3) nonlinear relationships between genetic and cost distances, and (4) correlation among cost distances derived from competing resistance models.

Evolutionary potential in the Alpine: trait heritabilities and performance variation of the dwarf willow Salix herbacea from different elevations and microhabitats.

Alpine ecosystems are seriously threatened by climate change. One of the key mechanisms by which plants can adapt to changing environmental conditions is through evolutionary change. However, we still know little about the evolutionary potential in wild populations of long-lived alpine plants.