Behavior and Ethology Commons^™

Movement Behavior And Metapopulation Connectivity Of Stream Salamanders In Response To Disturbance Events, Kathryn M. Greene

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

Metapopulations are shaped by the dispersal between populations in a landscape. Disturbance events can disrupt this connectivity resulting in local population extinction. For my dissertation, I used a combination of empirical and theoretical techniques to examine dispersal in response to disturbance and assessed it’s population-level consequences. My research used capture-mark-recapture sampling techniques to evaluate stream salamander movement in response to (1) a supraseasonal drought and (2) mountaintop-removal-mining (MTR) and valley-filling (VF) and (3) agent-based simulation modeling to evaluate population extinction risk in response to varying dispersal and mortality rates.

First, I evaluated the effects of a supraseasonal drought, a severe …

Ecological And Evolutionary Interactions Between Song Sparrows (Melospiza Melodia) And Their Bloodborne Parasites, Yanina Sarquis-Adamson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Local adaptation is the result of natural selection operating at a local scale, such that trade-offs in fitness across different environments result in individuals having higher fitness in their place of origin than when transported into a foreign environment. Populations may become locally adapted to features of their abiotic environment, or in the case of coevolutionary arms races between hosts and parasites, to other species comprising their biotic environment. If host populations are adapted to their local (sympatric) parasites, or conversely if parasites are adapted to their local hosts, then interactions with local parasite strains may influence the fitness consequences …