Austin Milt

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Center for Limnology

Dams, road crossings, and water withdrawals extensively fragment rivers, and watersheds often contain hundreds or thousands of barriers, some of which no longer meet societal purposes. Accordingly, both conservationists and infrastructure managers are faced with the challenge of prioritizing barriers for repair, replacement, or removal. Candidate p...

Conservation planning aims to optimize outcomes for select species or ecosystems by directing resources toward high-return sites. The possibility that local benefits might be increased by directing resources beyond the focal area is rarely considered. We present a case study of restoring river connectivity for migratory fish of the Great Lakes Basi...

Governments across the globe are exploring ways to reduce the environmental and human health impacts created by shale energy production. In active areas, environmental regulations tend to be limited. We apply established instruments to empirically estimated environmental impact abatement cost curves for the development of 56 sites in Pennsylvania,...

Structures that block movement of fish through river networks are built to serve a variety of societal needs, including transportation, hydroelectric power, and exclusion of exotic species. Due to their abundance, road crossings and dams reduce the amount of habitat available to fish that migrate from the sea or lakes into rivers to breed. The bene...

Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As an example, shale-gas extraction requires substantial surface infrastructure, which fragments habitats, erodes soils, degrades freshwater systems, and displaces rare species. Strategic planning of shale-gas infrastructure can reduce tr...

Hydraulic fracturing and related ground water issues are growing features in public discourse. Few have given much attention to surface impacts from shale gas development, which result from building necessary surface infrastructure. One way to reduce future impacts from gas surface development without radically changing industry practice is by form...

1.Observations of species occurrences are often used to inform spatial prioritizations for the effective use of limited conservation resources. Additional species observations have the potential to change where a conservation group plans to invest. But by how much? How different would conservation priorities be if planners updated current observati...

Background/Question/Methods Shale gas development in Central Appalachia (USA) has skyrocketed since 2007 due to rising natural gas prices and advancing hydrofracking and horizontal drilling. Shale gas development requires lots of surface infrastructure, the most prevalent being new well pads, access roads, and gathering pipelines. How large are t...

Background/Question/Methods Differences in spatial and temporal scale are intrinsic to many cross-species interactions. While intra-species population processes tend to take place at a single scale, cross-species interactions link each species’ response to the environment, and propagate environmental information across scales. We explore how scale...

Background/Question/Methods The assumption that collecting element occurrences records and updating the old improves conservation planning efforts may be unfounded if doing so only reinforces our current plans rather than indicating overlooked important places. Here we explore how updating old and adding new element occurrence records changes th...

Background/Question/Methods Ecologists, land managers and conservation planners face numerous technical and logistical challenges in assisting the recovery of imperiled wildlife species. One of these challenges is managing for the connectivity of wildlife habitat, especially when logistical resources and biological data are limited. Here we descr...

The Thai Government's search for alternatives to imported petroleum led to the consideration of mandating 10% biofuel blends (biodiesel and gasohol) by 2012. Concerns over the effects of biofuel combustion on ground level ozone formation in relation to their conventional counterparts need addressing. Ozone formation in Bangkok is explored using a t...