Ecology
The department's teaching and research addresses critical ecological and natural resources issues for Montana, but also tackles fundamental and applied questions around the globe. Undergraduate programs within the department include Fish & Wildlife Management and Ecology, Conservation Biology and Ecology, Organismal Biology, and Biology Teaching. Graduate programs (M.S. and P.hD.) include Fish & Wildlife Management or Biology and Biological Sciences and an intercollege PhD in Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
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Montana Cooperative Fishery Research Unit
www.montana.edu/mtcfru
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Recent Submissions
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Retreat but no surrender: net-spinning caddisfly (Hydropsychidae) silk has enduring effects on stream channel hydraulics
(2020-02)Animals and plants engineer their physical environment by building structures that create or modify habitat. Biotic effects on physical habitats can influence community composition, trophic dynamics, and ecosystem processes; ... -
The indirect paths to cascading effects of extinctions in mutualistic networks
(2020-05)Biodiversity loss is a hallmark of our times, but predicting its consequences is challenging. Ecological interactions form complex networks with multiple direct and indirect paths through which the impacts of an extinction ... -
Assessing the Performance of Index Calibration Survey Methods to Monitor Populations of Wide‐ranging Low‐density Carnivores
(2020-03)Apex carnivores are wide‐ranging, low‐density, hard to detect, and declining throughout most of their range, making population monitoring both critical and challenging. Rapid and inexpensive index calibration survey (ICS) ... -
Carnivores, competition and genetic connectivity in the Anthropocene
(2019-11)Current extinction rates are comparable to five prior mass extinctions in the earth’s history, and are strongly affected by human activities that have modified more than half of the earth’s terrestrial surface. Increasing ... -
Sources of Variation in Maternal Allocation in a Long‐lived Mammal
(2020-06)Life history theory predicts allocation of energy to reproduction varies with maternal age, but additional maternal features may be important to the allocation of energy to reproduction. We aimed to characterize age‐specific ... -
Evaluating Native Bee Communities and Nutrition in Managed Grasslands
(2020-06)Native pollinators are important for providing vital services in agroecosystems; however, their numbers are declining globally. Bees are the most efficient and diverse members of the pollinator community; therefore, it is ... -
Occupied and abandoned structures from ecosystem engineering differentially facilitate stream community colonization
(2019-05)Ecosystem engineers transform habitats in ways that facilitate a diversity of species; however, few investigations have isolated short‐term effects of engineers from the longer‐term legacy effects of their engineered ... -
Evaluating Irrigation Efficiency: Toward a Sustainable Water Future for Montana
(The Montana University System Water Center, 2020-11)Water is our most valuable natural resource, and is used to support the demands of industry, agriculture, hydroelectric power generation, and municipalities. Water also sustains Montana’s booming recreation and tourism ... -
Solitary bee life history traits and sex mediate responses to manipulated seasonal temperatures and season length
(2019-08)The effects of climate change on solitary bee species, the most diverse and abundant group of wild pollinators, remain poorly understood, limiting our ability to forecast consequences for bee-plant interactions and pollination ... -
CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN HEALTH IN MONTANA: A Special Report of the Montana Climate Assessment
(Montana Institute on Ecosystems, 2020-12)The purpose of this assessment is to a) present understandable, science-based, Montana-specific information about the impacts of climate change on the health of Montanans; and b) describe how our healthcare providers, state ... -
Wildfires Influence Abundance, Diversity, and Intraspecific and Interspecific Trait Variation of Native Bees and Flowering Plants Across Burned and Unburned Landscapes
(2019-07)Wildfire regimes are changing in the western United States, yet the ways in which wildfires influence native bees, the resources they depend on for food and nesting, or the traits that influence their interactions with ... -
Evaluating and presenting uncertainty in model‐based unconstrained ordination
(2019-12)Variability in ecological community composition is often analyzed by recording the presence or abundance of taxa in sample units, calculating a symmetric matrix of pairwise distances or dissimilarities among sample units ... -
Thermal variability drives synchronicity of an aquatic insect resource pulse
(2019-08)Spatial heterogeneity in environmental conditions can prolong food availability by desynchronizing the timing of ephemeral, high‐magnitude resource pulses. Spatial patterns of water temperature are highly variable among ... -
Inter-population differences in salinity tolerance of adult wild Sacramento splittail: osmoregulatory and metabolic responses to salinity
(2016-02)The Sacramento splittail (Pogonichthys macrolepidotus) is a minnow endemic to the highly modified San Francisco Estuary of California, USA and its associated rivers and tributaries. This species is composed of two genetically ... -
Nesting success of wood-cavity-nesting bees declines with increasing time since wildfire
(2019-10)Bees require distinct foraging and nesting resources to occur in close proximity. However, spatial and temporal patterns in the availability and quantity of these resources can be affected by disturbances like wildfire. ... -
Diel cycling hypoxia enhances hypoxia-tolerance in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss): evidence of physiological and metabolic plasticity
(2019-07-19)Many fish naturally encounter a daily cycle of hypoxia, but it is unclear whether this exposure hardens hypoxia-intolerant fish to future hypoxia or leads to accumulated stress and death. The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus ... -
Snowpack influences spatial and temporal soil nitrogen dynamics in a western U.S. montane forested watershed
(2019-07-19)Declines in winter snowpack have increased the severity of summer droughts in western U.S. forests, with the potential to also impact soil available nitrogen (N). To understand how snowpack controls spatiotemporal N ... -
Evaluating mechanisms of plant-mediated effects on herbivore persistence and occupancy across an ecoregion
(2019-06)Contemporary climate change is rapidly creating one of the greatest challenges for management and conservation during the 21st century. Mountain ecosystems, which have a high degree of spatial heterogeneity and contain ... -
The Climatic Water Balance and Topography Control Spatial Patterns of Atmospheric Demand, Soil Moisture, and Shallow Subsurface Flow
(2019-05)Catchment hydrometeorology and the organization of shallow subsurface flow are key drivers of active contributing areas and streamflow generation. However, understanding how the climatic water balance and complex topography ... -
Killer whales redistribute white shark foraging pressure on seals
(2019-04)Predatory behavior and top-down effects in marine ecosystems are well-described, however, intraguild interactions among co-occurring marine top predators remain less understood, but can have far reaching ecological ...
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