Research from the last two decades has elucidated the importance of migration in the annual cycle of ducks, but many aspects of migration ecology remain poorly understood due to the difficulty of investigating movements ...

Canada geese (Branta canadensis) breed in subarctic and temperate areas of North America, but both populations typically winter in temperate regions of the northern United States. During winter, Canada geese are increasingly ...

Research on ecosystem services strives to build stronger linkages between ecological and economic systems in order to improve ecosystem management and human well-being. By clarifying how human populations benefit from ...

Prairies have become a globally endangered resource. In Illinois, the pervasiveness of agriculture has resulted in an almost complete loss of natural prairie. Wildlife associated with prairie and grassland has concomitantly ...

Shrubland birds are among the fastest declining groups of birds over the past 50 years. Habitat loss and degradation are proposed as being major drivers, but the underlying causes of these declines are unknown. I investigated ...

It has been widely debated whether producing ethanol from corn is sustainable in the long term. Environmentally, the major concern is that producing ethanol from corn involves intensive water and energy consumption. ...

Auchenorrhyncha (i.e., leafhoppers, treehoppers, spittlebugs, and planthoppers) represent some most diverse groups of herbivorous insects in the tallgrass prairie, they have close associations with many native prairie ...

In this study I evaluated the effectiveness of an acoustic recording system (SRS) for surveying tropical bird communities and species relative to traditional point count surveys. To address this goal, I compared species ...

The origin and maintenance of sexual reproduction has long been of interest to evolutionary biologists. While the relationship between genetic diversity and asexuality has received recent attention, the precise nature of ...

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere has increased from its pre-industrial value of 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to 384 ppmv. ...