Bradley A. Strickland

• PhD MS BS
• Data Sciences Branch Lead at National Park Service

Predicting the responses of animals to environmental changes is a fundamental goal of ecology and is necessary for conservation and management of species. While most studies focus on relatively gradual changes, extreme events may have lasting impacts on populations. Animals respond to major disturbances such as hurricanes by seeking shelter, migrat...

Wetlands are dynamic environments where aquatic organisms are affected by both predictable and unpredictable changes in hydrology. Understanding how abundant large-bodied predators respond to these changes is especially important in context of wetland restoration. We used satellite telemetry to investigate how individual (e.g., sex, size, body cond...

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are predicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems...

Background Hurricanes can have catastrophic effects on coastal ecosystems. To minimize negative impacts of storms, animals may seek shelter in place, move to a nearby refuge, or evacuate long-distances. Crocodilians can be important predators in estuarine habitats, but little is known about how they respond to extreme weather events. We investigate...

Accurate population estimates and assessments of trajectory are an essential part of harvest management for game species and conservation action plans for protected species. Long-term monitoring can lead to ecological understanding by identifying biotic and abiotic drivers of population dynamics. Spotlight surveys are a widely used method to monito...

Ecosystem engineering is a facilitative interaction that generates bottom‐up extrinsic variability that may increase species coexistence, particularly along a stress/disturbance gradient. American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) create and maintain ‘alligator ponds’ that serve as dry‐season refuges for other animals. During seasonal water r...

Background Animal habitat use can be influenced by a suite of factors including intraspecific interactions and resource availability. The broad-snouted caiman (Caiman latirostris) is the largest crocodylian species distributed in freshwater environments of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, where it inhabits many types of human-impacted and preserved h...

1. Artisanal fishing is an important subsistence practice in freshwater habitats worldwide, but overexploitation threatens the conservation of several nontarget species including crocodylians. We investigated the effects of artisanal fishing on the distribution of a population of broad-snouted caiman (Caiman latirostris) inhabiting the Tapacurá res...

Disturbances can produce a spectrum of short‐ and long‐term ecological consequences that depend on complex interactions of the characteristics of the event, antecedent environmental conditions, and the intrinsic properties of resistance and resilience of the affected biological system. We used Hurricane Harvey's impact on coastal rivers of Texas to...

Nocturnal spotlight surveys have been historically used to determine patterns in crocodylians’ space-time ecology. This approach provides reliable insights about their conservation, especially when is based on long-term monitoring. We assessed how weather, habitat features, and anthropogenic factors influence distribution and population trends of b...

The potential for animals to modify spatial patterns of nutrient limitation for autotrophs and habitat availability for other members of their communities is increasingly recognized. However, net trophic effects of consumers acting as ecosystem engineers remain poorly known. The American Alligator Alligator mississippiensis is an abundant predator...

The cover image is based on the Original Article Structure and functional composition of macroinvertebrate communities in coastal plain streams across a precipitation gradient, by Fernando R. Carvallo et al. https://doi.org/10.1111/fwb.13968.

Climate change is expected to alter rainfall and temperature regimes across the world. The hydrology and riparian zone vegetation of lotic ecosystems are tightly linked to rainfall and a mechanistic understanding of the effects of rainfall on lotic ecosystems is needed to forecast the ecological impacts of climate change. However, it is difficult t...

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are pre- dicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosyste...

Animal dietary information provides the foundation for understanding trophic relationships, which is essential for ecosystem management. Yet, in marine systems, high-resolution diet reconstruction tools are currently under-developed. This is particularly pertinent for large marine vertebrates, for which direct foraging behaviour is difficult or imp...

Tropical cyclones play an increasingly important role in shaping ecosystems. Understanding and generalizing their responses is challenging because of meteorological variability among storms and its interaction with ecosystems. We present a research framework designed to compare tropical cyclone effects within and across ecosystems that: a) uses a d...

The life histories of estuarine species are often adapted to the environmental variability they experience. However, estuaries are increasingly vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic changes, necessitating an understanding of how shifting conditions affect the survival, behaviour and population structure of estuarine-dependent animals. In this stu...

Chronic environmental change threatens biodiversity, but acute disturbance events present more rapid and immediate threats. In 2010, a cold snap across south Florida had wide-ranging impacts, including negative effects on recreational fisheries, agriculture, and ecological communities. Here, we use acoustic telemetry and historical longline monitor...

Extreme climate events such as hurricanes can influence the movement and distribution of fish and other aquatic vertebrates. However, our understanding of the scale of movement responses and how they vary across taxa and ecosystems remains incomplete. In this study, we used acoustic telemetry data to investigate the movement patterns of common snoo...

The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is a keystone species that exhibits strong top-down effects on both ecosystem structure and function. As a highly mobile predator, alligators can link spatially segregated food webs and influence prey abundance, composition, and behavior across space and time. Therefore, understanding alligator mo...

Habitat selection is an active behavioral process that may vary across spatial and temporal scales. Animals choose an area of primary utilization (i.e., home range) then make decisions focused on resource needs within patches. Dominance may affect the spatial distribution of conspecifics and concomitant habitat selection. Size-dependent social domi...

Relocations for radio-tracked adult male alligators at Ross Barnett Reservoir and Pearl River, Mississippi, USA, 2012?2013. The csv file includes animal identification code, location, date and time, and assigned habitat categories determined from S1 File. (CSV)

Total length, number of relocations, and home range size of radio-tracked adult male alligators at Ross Barnett Reservoir and Pearl River, Mississippi, USA, 2012?2013. (DOCX)

Habitat categorization map for Ross Barnett Reservoir and Pearl River, Mississippi, USA, 2012?2013. The csv file includes information obtained from the August 2012 United States Department of Agriculture?s National Agriculture Imagery Program, water depths collected by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks in August 2005, and...

Wildlife management and conservation frequently rely on understanding mechanisms that influence distribution and abundance of animals. I quantified space use for a population of inland riverine adult male alligators in Mississippi. Results indicated habitat selection is a scale-dependent process and aquatic vegetation, water depth, and water temper...

Background/Question/Methods Dominance rank may influence resource selection and space use, which in turn impacts an individual’s fitness. In crocodilians, studies of captive populations suggest social behavior is characterized by size–dependent absolute hierarchies (independent of time and location), where large, aggressive males control access t...

The Flint River in southwestern Georgia is known for its historically diverse mussel fauna, but the current sta- tus of the fauna is poorly known. The rediscovery of two presumed extirpated and extinct species in 2006 and 2008 exemplifies the need for a large-scale survey of the river. We used an occupancy modeling approach to estimate the presence...

Presence/absence sampling designs are commonly used approaches for documenting the occurrence of benthic invertebrates, but these methods often provide biased indices of occupancy or abundance. Unionids are particularly susceptible to bias associated with nondetection because of their generally low abundance and burrowing behavior. We present a cas...