Predicting marine habitat for marbled murrelets during breeding and nonbreeding seasons in the Salish Sea, British Columbia, Canada.

The marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) is a small seabird inhabiting coastal regions along the Pacific coast of North America, and nests in old-growth forests usually within 80 km from shore. The Canadian population of marbled murrelets is listed as Threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act. To investigate the species' marine distribution, we conducted analyses of the occurrence of marbled murrelets at-sea between 2000 and 2022, utilizing at-sea and marine shoreline surveys in the Canadian portion of the Salish Sea.

Occupancy trends of overwintering coastal waterbird communities reveal guild-specific patterns of redistribution and shifting reliance on existing protected areas.

Climate change and anthropogenic stressors are redistributing species and altering community composition globally. Protected areas (PAs) may not sufficiently protect populations of species undergoing distributional shifts, necessitating that we evaluate existing PAs and identify areas for future protection to conserve biodiversity across regional and temporal scales. Coastal waterbirds are important indicators of marine ecosystem health, representing mobile, long-lived, higher trophic-level consumers.

Raising the bar: Recovery ambition for species at risk in Canada and the US.

Routinely crossing international borders and/or persisting in populations across multiple countries, species are commonly subject to a patchwork of endangered species legislation. Canada and the United States share numerous endangered species; their respective acts, the Species at Risk Act (SARA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA), require documents that outline requirements for species recovery. Although there are many priorities for improving endangered species legislation effectiveness, species recovery goals are a crucial component.

HUMAN IMPACTS. The unique ecology of human predators.

Paradigms of sustainable exploitation focus on population dynamics of prey and yields to humanity but ignore the behavior of humans as predators. We compared patterns of predation by contemporary hunters and fishers with those of other predators that compete over shared prey (terrestrial mammals and marine fishes). Our global survey (2125 estimates of annual finite exploitation rate) revealed that humans kill adult prey, the reproductive capital of populations, at much higher median rates than other predators (up to 14 times higher), with particularly intense exploitation of terrestrial carnivores and fishes.

Novel species interactions: American black bears respond to Pacific herring spawn.

Background: In addition to the decline and extinction of the world's species, the decline and eventual loss of species interactions is one of the major consequences of the biodiversity crisis. On the Pacific coast of North America, diminished runs of salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) drive numerous marine-terrestrial interactions, many of which have been intensively studied, but marine-terrestrial interactions driven by other species remain relatively unknown.

Trends in extinction risk for imperiled species in Canada.

Protecting and promoting recovery of species at risk of extinction is a critical component of biodiversity conservation. In Canada, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) determines whether species are at risk of extinction or extirpation, and has conducted these assessments since 1977. We examined trends in COSEWIC assessments to identify whether at-risk species that have been assessed more than once tended to improve, remain constant, or deteriorate in status, as a way of assessing the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation in Canada.

Fine-scale spatiotemporal influences of salmon on growth and nitrogen signatures of Sitka spruce tree rings.

Background: The marine-terrestrial transfer of salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) provides a substantial pulse of nutrients to receiving ecosystems along the Pacific coast of North America and has been shown to enhance productivity and isotopic signatures of conifers and other riparian vegetation. An explicitly spatial, within-watershed investigation of the influence of salmon on conifers has never been previously investigated.