A series of devastating Harmful Algal Blooms caused by Prymnesium parvum occurred in Possum Kingdom Lake resulting in an estimated economic loss to the local counties of 2.8 million and 1.1 million dollars in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Three important shifts in the lake’s ecol…
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The Puget Lowland of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) has a dynamic post-glacial vegetation and climate history. Vegetation structure and fire frequency may be affected by a variety of factors such as large-scale climatic change, as well as more local factors like changing natural an…
Two distinct studies within the Saltville Valley of southwestern Virginia revealed insights into local Pleistocene geology and paleontology. A variety of analytical techniques were applied to gravel deposits within the paleontological site of SV-5/7 that revealed this unit is ve…
In 2013, Van Dyke excavated a historic residence located at 309th Paris Street in Castroville, Texas. Beginning in 1844, the house was occupied by the families that had immigrated from the Alsace region of France. Preliminary analyses of the faunal recovered from a lime slaking …
Painters Flat is a small basin that sits along the northern California-Nevada border. It has never been studied in detail. During 2020 fieldwork, I collected geomorphic and sedimentological data to construct the hydrologic history of the basin throughout the late Pleistocene and…
Alm Shelter, located in north-central Wyoming, is an archaeological site with a long history of human occupation. This study addresses new contextual information in the form of dated sediment deposits, analysis of sediment types, and a computer model to assist with identifying c…
Sloths are a curious group with a rich fossil history but enigmatic ecology. Proxy techniques like stable isotope analysis (SIA) can provide insight into the dietary ecology of extinct and extant sloths, but both groups present challenges to its application. My approach here is …
Insects are unparalleled in species diversity and breadth of ecological associations. The most prominent of these ecological associations is insect herbivory on vascular plants, which has shaped terrestrial ecosystems for hundreds of millions of years. Only recently have scienti…
The North American river otter is a semiaquatic carnivore that occupies freshwater habitats across most of North America, and is a conservation symbol across most of its range. It is used as an indicator species, a keystone species, an umbrella species, and an example of conserv…
During the Cretaceous the Caribbean was home to vast carbonate platforms where rudist bivalves contributed extensively to reef development. Carbonate platforms have been well-studied in Mexico and Texas, but less so in some Caribbean islands. On the island of Puerto Rico, the Ba…
Every ecological system, past or present, developed from a path-dependent history of evolution and ecology. A tangible way to describe this history is through characterizing biodiversity patterns and processes of stability or change. Although the traditional use of biodiversity …
Organic matter stored in wetlands constitutes a globally significant terrestrial carbon pool interacting with atmospheric carbon via unique ecological processes that release CH4 but take in CO2. Efforts are ongoing to quantify the role of wetlands in terrestrial-atmosphere carbo…
My dissertation focuses on the strength of synchrony (coincident events in space and time) in the history of fire occurrence as a function of various casual agents between points of interest in the Border Lakes region of northern Minnesota. I specifically investigate how spatial…
Contemporary species are undergoing population declines and extinction at rates unprecedented in recorded history. These ongoing global biodiversity losses are largely caused by human overpopulation and other anthropogenic impacts on the environment such as natural habitat destr…
Extensive research has been conducted at Lake Tanganyika with the aim of understanding its vulnerability to both warming climate and fishing pressure. However, much of this work has been restricted to the more accessible northern basin. Studies from a limited geographic region o…
Morphology is one of the oldest branches of science, encompassing the form, structure, and transformation of natural materials, whether biotic or abiotic. In the context of contemporary Biology, morphology may be most broadly conceived as the qualitative and quantitative theory …
The purpose of this dissertation research is to examine the paleoecology of the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) and the pygmy mammoth (M. exilis) on the individual, population, and community level, emphasizing factors internal to their ecosystem that may have contributed t…
Climate models predict increases in temperature and hydrologic variability for the remainder of the 21st century, threatening California’s fire-prone ecosystems. To gain a better understanding of future climate-fire-environment dynamics, it is important to study how biomass burn…
Two paleogeographic configurations of the Jurassic of western North America have been proposed with differing locations of the entrance to the Jurassic Sundance Seaway, referred to as the southern-entrance and northern-entrance hypotheses. Here, analyses of facies architecture, …