Amy Villamagna

Plymouth State University | Plymouth · Department of Environmental Science and Policy, Center for the Environment

Populations of wild Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) continue to decline across their historic range, making relatively healthy populations and intact habitats within northern New England increasingly important for conservation. The Beebe River watershed, located in central New Hampshire, is home to intact headwater populations of wild Brook Tro...

Protected areas remain the most commonly used tool for in situ conservation; however growth in the USA's system of public lands has stagnated while private land conservation continues to expand. Easements can provide a range of ecosystem services (ESs), but it is unknown whether conservation easements maintain ES capacities equivalent to public pro...

Watershed processes – physical, chemical, and biological – are the foundation for many benefi ts that ecosystems provide for human societies. A crucial step toward accurately representing those benefi ts, so they can ultimately inform decisions about land and water management, is the development of a coherent methodology that can translate availabl...

Wildlife-associated recreation is culturally and economically important, yet relative participation in the United States is declining. To address concerns of recreation managers, we present an innovative way to assess temporal trends and the spatial distribution of licensees in conjunction with demographic, economic, biophysical and social datasets...

Despite recent interest, ecosystem services are not yet fully incorporated into private and public decisions about natural resource management. Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are among the most challenging of services to include because they comprise complex ecological and social properties and processes that make them difficult to measure, map...

Ecosystem services (ES) offer an insightful framework for identifying tradeoffs in alternative solutions to environmental problems. Key components of ES delivery include an ecosystem’s capacity to provide a service, public demand for that service, and the flow of the service to beneficiaries. Each component often can be mapped with existing data, a...

There is broad support for the notion that ecosystem services influence human well-being (HWB), however, the means to measure such an effect are elusive. Measures of HWB are commonly used within the fields of psychology, economics, and international development, but thus far have not been integrated fully into ecosystem service assessments. We exam...

Many businesses today are striving to improve their environmental sustainability for a variety of reasons, ranging from consumer demand for "greener" products to potential cost-savings. For many business decision-makers who lack formal environmental training, the process of identifying facets of their organization that can be improved is unclear an...

Public use and conservation areas (PUAs) offer opportunities to protect and enhance the delivery of ecosystem services (ES), however ES are rarely evaluated on such lands. We developed a spatially-explicit method for estimating regulating and cultural service capacity and evaluating intent to conserve ES in PUAs. We use management priority informat...

Water hyacinth is among the most widespread invasive plants worldwide; however, its effects on waterbirds are largely undocumented. We monitored site use by waterbirds at Lake Chapala, the largest lake in Mexico and recently designated Ramsar site, to evaluate the potential influence of water hyacinth cover on species composition and aggregate meas...

Evans, Daniel M., C. Andrew Dolloff, W. Michael Aust, and Amy M. Villamagna, 2012. Effects of Eastern Hemlock Decline on Large Wood Loads in Streams of the Appalachian Mountains. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 48(2): 266-276. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2011.00610.x Abstract: Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), a foundatio...

American Coot (Fulica americana) behavior was observed and Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) cover measured at Lake Chapala, Mexico, to determine whether site selection, habitat use, behavior within habitat types and selection of habitats for foraging were affected by the invasive aquatic plant. Water Hyacinth significantly affected habitat cho...

1. Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is one of the world’s most invasive aquatic plants and is known to cause significant ecological and socio-economic effects. 2. Water hyacinth can alter water clarity and decrease phytoplankton production, dissolved oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, heavy metals and concentrations of other contaminants. 3. The e...