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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Elk Abundance, Survival, And Health In The Cumberland Mountains Of Tennessee, Katherine Kurth
Elk Abundance, Survival, And Health In The Cumberland Mountains Of Tennessee, Katherine Kurth
Doctoral Dissertations
Managing sustainable wildlife populations requires insight into population abundance and health. Since reintroduction, elk (Cervus canadensis) at the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area (NCWMA) in Tennessee have shown marginal population growth using low-precision abundance estimates. Limited research investigating possible population limiting factors has occurred since evaluations conducted directly after translocation. To provide information necessary for effective population management, we estimated abundance, identified survival rates, and conducted mortality and health surveillance. Precise abundance estimates of eastern elk populations are challenging to obtain using traditional capture-recapture due to invasive handling of individuals and low detection in forested landscapes. Therefore, we …
Supplementing East Tennessee Landscapes For Pollinators With Native Perennials, Amani Khalil
Supplementing East Tennessee Landscapes For Pollinators With Native Perennials, Amani Khalil
Masters Theses
Tennessee, home to the Great Smoky Mountains, is a biodiversity hotspot for many plant and animal species, yet it receives relatively few conservation dollars (Jenkins et al., 2015). As a biodiversity hotspot, this region may be home to many endemic species, but little is known about the abundance or diversity of insect pollinators. In order to both estimate pollinator communities in East Tennessee and pollinator forage preferences for native Tennessee plants, we established four plots, comprised of three plant families across five common land use types. Over two field seasons we collected nearly 7,300 insect specimens with a total sampling …
Urbanization Impacts On Land Snail Community Composition, Mackenzie N. Hodges
Urbanization Impacts On Land Snail Community Composition, Mackenzie N. Hodges
Masters Theses
Urbanization has tremendous impacts on most native species. Urban ecosystems are becoming increasingly prevalent, while urban ecology is a relatively underdeveloped field. This is especially true for terrestrial mollusks, which are a surprisingly understudied organism. Due to their low mobility and dispersal potential, land snails are valuable indicators of ecosystem disturbance. For this study, land snails were collected in 54 city parks along an urban gradient to understand influences of urbanization on snail communities. Sampled parks include small extensively landscaped downtown parks, neighborhood and community parks, district parks, and large nature parks, each with variable vegetation, soil characteristics, disturbance regimes, …
Conservation Planning In A Changing World, Austin Walker Milt
Conservation Planning In A Changing World, Austin Walker Milt
Doctoral Dissertations
As a science and practice dedicated to preventing, stopping, and reversing negative effects on nature, conservation is constantly faced with new challenges. Combine this fact with the rise of large, freely available datasets and computational power, and the result is a need to advance the methods and conceptual approach to conservation planning. In my dissertation I present novel methods and address research questions that aim to keep conservation science and practice relevant and effective in a changing world. This picture of continual change is illustrated in Chapter 1, in which I explore how the ongoing collection of observations of rare …