Modification of landscapes for agricultural production can introduce agrochemicals into surface waters and degrade aquatic habitats used by many amphibians for breeding and larval development. Although many ecotoxicological studies have shown...

of floodplain forest restoration on a large, regulated river in an agricultural valley. I used infrared, time-lapse video to identify agriculture-associated nest predators as a primary source of nest mortality in the Sacramento River Valley, California. Then...

Monocotyledonous plants are a well-circumscribed lineage comprising 25% of all angiosperm species, including many agriculturally and ecologically important species (e.g., grasses, palms, orchids, lilies, yams, pondweeds, seagrasses, aroids...

predictor of AMF community composition. AMF communities of remnant unplowed prairies differed from those of disturbed prairies regardless of soil substrate. Within disturbed prairies, sites that experienced industrial agriculture contained AMF communities...

, surface water runoff, and even rainfall. Further, as they metamorphose into terrestrial juveniles, they are subject to exposure on land, especially in agricultural landscapes. The main objective of my research was to investigate how low, ecologically...

While there are many types of habitat loss and degradation (e.g., agriculture, land development), many studies have focused on the impacts of logging on wildlife populations and on ecosystem processes. Little information, however, exists...

Most plants convert sunlight into chemical energy using a process known as C[subscript 3] photosynthesis. However, some of the world's most successful plants instead use the C[subscript 4] photosynthetic pathway which ...

Forest fragmentation creates edge habitat that attracts nest predators that lower reproductive success and force birds to renest. To determine if predation-induced renesting causes a decline in condition of females and ...

Effective amphibian conservation requires an understanding of how populations respond to specific natural and anthropogenic factors. Chemical contaminants are among the known sources of acute and chronic stress and have ...

I used both demographic modeling and experimental field research to evaluate the role of terrestrial habitat in the population dynamics and conservation of pond-breeding amphibians. I began by using literature data to ...

Partner abundance affects costs and benefits in obligate mutualisms, but its role in facultative partnerships is less clear. I investigated this topic in a small alpine pollination web in the Colorado Rocky Mountains ...

The failure of endosperm development due to interploidy crosses could be due to two reasons, neither of which has been studied on its own. 1) There is an imbalance of inherited imprinted loci in the endosperm (HAIG and ...

Salamanders in the Appalachian region have been extensively studied, but the majority of research assessing the impacts of logging has focused on terrestrial species that are not dependent on stream habitats for egg ...

The movement of individuals within and among populations has been recognized as an important determinant of the persistence of species. Fragmentation of terrestrial landscapes has exacerbated the need to understand the ...

Amphibian diversity and abundance are generally reduced following clearcut logging. These impacts often last for decades, but little is known about why diversity and abundance are depressed. I examined gray treefrog breeding ...

Life history strategies of many birds in the Neotropics remain poorly known. In particular, details on the seasonal movements of individuals and populations within the Neotropics remain largely unknown, including short-distance ...

The goal of my dissertation was to assess how terrestrial salamanders respond to two common forest management practices -- prescribed fire and timber harvest. Previous studies have reported that timber harvest adversely ...

We developed a translational magnetic tweezers for quantitative measurements at cellular and sub-cellular level. In the cellular studies, multiple membrane tethers were extracted simultaneously under constant force transduced ...

Nectar is the primary floral reward offered by plants to attract pollinators. Pollinators often exhibit a preference for certain types of nectars over others. If pollinator preferences for certain nectar traits are strong ...

Land use is a pervasive form of disturbance affecting natural systems on Earth. My dissertation research is set within the context of a large scale project referred to as Land-use Effects on Amphibian Populations (LEAP), ...