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Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Quantifying Insect Emergence In Tidal Freshwaters And The Importance Of Aquatic Prey In Wetland-Dependent Songbird Diet, Samantha L. Rogers Jan 2023

Quantifying Insect Emergence In Tidal Freshwaters And The Importance Of Aquatic Prey In Wetland-Dependent Songbird Diet, Samantha L. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Insectivorous birds and their arthropod prey are experiencing widespread population declines, driven largely by anthropogenic disturbance and climate change. For wetland-dependent insectivores that consume a mixture of terrestrial and aquatic insects, understanding the availability, consumption, and nutritional qualities of aquatic diet subsidies is important for conservation. I use prothonotary warblers (Protonotaria citrea) as a model species throughout this work, because their breeding season aligns with aquatic insect emergence and they include aquatic insects when provisioning nestlings. In the first chapter, I estimate aquatic insect emergence from tidal freshwaters, which are understudied compared to nontidal systems. Using continuous field …


The Role Of Nest Location On The Reproductive Success Of Piping Plovers Breeding At Rockaway Beach, New York, Clara I.D. Arndtsen Jul 2022

The Role Of Nest Location On The Reproductive Success Of Piping Plovers Breeding At Rockaway Beach, New York, Clara I.D. Arndtsen

Theses and Dissertations

The study’s goal was to learn what aspects of the piping plover experience affect reproductive outcomes at Rockaway Beach Endangered Species Nesting Area. Nest location was found to help predict reproductive success. Nests further from American oystercatcher nests were likely to fledge more chicks. Reproductive success was low in 2021.


Nesting Ecology Of Wood Ducks And Other Cavity-Nesting Ducks In Mississippi, Justin Taylor Gibson May 2022

Nesting Ecology Of Wood Ducks And Other Cavity-Nesting Ducks In Mississippi, Justin Taylor Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Man-made nest boxes are surrogate nest sites widely used by waterfowl managers in North America to propagate free-ranging Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa) and other cavity-nesting waterfowl. I monitored 129 and 174 nest boxes in 2020 and 2021, respectively, at Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge and York Woods, Mississippi. I evaluated site-specific biotic and abiotic factors that were potentially influential on nest survival of Wood Ducks and general nesting ecology and apparent nest success of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) and Hooded Mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus). Daily survival rate of Wood Ducks was negatively influenced by increasing encroaching vegetation at Noxubee NWR and …


Evaluating Population Genetic Structure And Potential Genomic Signals Of Natural Selection In A Migratory Songbird (Protonotaria Citrea), Tyler A. Hohenstein Jan 2022

Evaluating Population Genetic Structure And Potential Genomic Signals Of Natural Selection In A Migratory Songbird (Protonotaria Citrea), Tyler A. Hohenstein

Theses and Dissertations

In this study I attempted to further resolve the population genetic structure in the Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea), and conducted an outlier SNP analysis and exploratory gene ontology analysis to investigate potential ongoing natural selection in the species. This analysis of population structure confirms previous work by DeSaix et al. (2019), where weak population structure was observed between eastern sites along the Atlantic Coastal Plain, and western sites in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, possibly due to a genetic discontinuity across the Appalachian Mountains. I conducted two forms of outlier SNP analyses, a principal component analysis (PCA)-based approach to identify SNPs …


Searching For Gold: Using A Novel Land Cover Classification To Identify Multiscale Drivers Of Site Occupancy By A Flagship Species For Early-Successional Habitat Conservation, Baron Lin Jan 2021

Searching For Gold: Using A Novel Land Cover Classification To Identify Multiscale Drivers Of Site Occupancy By A Flagship Species For Early-Successional Habitat Conservation, Baron Lin

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding habitat selection at multiple scales is an important step in guiding conservation programs and reversing species declines. This, however, is difficult for species that occupy early-successional habitats (ESH) due to a lack of accurate representation of shrub cover in publicly available land cover data. The Golden-winged Warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera; GWWA) is a threatened species of conservation concern and a flagship for ESH conservation. We used a novel, LIDAR-derived land cover classification that accurately identifies shrubs at a fine resolution (1m) to investigate how habitat composition and configuration influence GWWA site occupancy. We aggregated this same land cover …


Migratory Patterns And Population Genetic Structure In A Declining Wetland-Dependent Songbird, Matthew G. Desaix Jan 2018

Migratory Patterns And Population Genetic Structure In A Declining Wetland-Dependent Songbird, Matthew G. Desaix

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding migratory connectivity is essential for assessing the drivers behind population dynamics and for implementing effective management in migratory species. Genetic markers provide a means to describe migratory connectivity, as well as incorporate population genetic analyses, however genetic markers can be uninformative for species with weak genetic structure. In this study, we evaluate range-wide population genetic structure and migratory connectivity in the prothonotary warbler, Protonotaria citrea, a wetland-dependent neotropical migratory songbird, using high-resolution genetic markers. We reveal regional genetic structure between sampling sites in the Mississippi River Valley and the Atlantic Seaboard with overall weak genetic differentiation among populations …