Christopher L. Merkord

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Minnesota State University Moorhead

Local adaptation may facilitate range expansion during invasions, but the mechanisms promoting destructive invasions remain unclear. Cheatgrass ( Bromus tectorum ), native to Eurasia and Africa, has invaded globally, with particularly severe impacts in western North America. We sequenced 307 genotypes and conducted controlled experiments. We found...

Hypoxia is a seasonally recurring environmental condition in small temperate lakes during summer thermal stratification and under ice cover in winter. Anthropogenic eutrophication contributes significantly to hypoxia by increasing primary production of organic materials that subsequently decompose in the hypolimnion. Greenhouse gas emissions that i...

Surveying breeding birds at the Regional Science Center including grassland species using the restored prairie. Assessment of the protection efforts from restored prairie grassland and the species that live there.

Relatively little is known about the longevity of free-living landbirds, especially in the tropics. We used mark-recapture data for birds originally banded in 2005 and 2006, and later recaptured between 2011 and 2016, to estimate minimum longevity for 20 species from southeastern Peru. The oldest recorded longevity was 10 years, 6 months for a Blac...

Background Remotely-sensed earth observation data have the potential to inform early warning systems for malaria and other environmentally mediated diseases due to the lagged relation between environmental conditions at present and disease transmission potential in the near future. A common approach is to use total rainfall and mean temperature at...

Background Infectious disease surveillance has traditionally focused on tracking human cases along with arthropod vectors and zoonotic hosts. For climate-sensitive diseases, there is potential to strengthen surveillance and predict future outbreaks by monitoring environmental risk factors using broad-scale sensor networks. We aim to highlight the o...

Background Early indication of an emerging malaria epidemic can provide an opportunity for proactive interventions. Challenges to the identification of nascent malaria epidemics include obtaining recent epidemiological surveillance data, spatially and temporally harmonizing this information with timely data on environmental precursors, applying mod...

With the loss of over 70% of North America's grasslands (Samson et al. 2004), grassland birds increasingly rely on habitat that is privately owned and managed for livestock production. Therefore, it is critical to understand how livestock grazing influences grassland bird abundance and community structure. We evaluated the response of 4 obligate gr...

Floodplain forests are dynamic habitats that support a high diversity and abundance of birds. Periodic flood disturbance is important in the establishment and maintenance of the heterogeneous mosaic of vegetation communities across the riverine landscape. Human suppression of disturbance regimes has been implicated in the decline of bird species in...

Flow regulation has significantly altered hydrological, geomorphic, and ecological processes on the Missouri River. Cumulative effects are evident in declines in cottonwood (Populus deltoides) recruitment and in altered forest age structure and composition. Record runoff in 2011 exceeded reservoir capacity on the Upper and Middle Missouri, leading...

Flow regulation has significantly altered hydrological, geomorphic, and ecological processes on the Missouri River. Cumulative effects are evident in declines in cottonwood (Populus deltoides) recruitment and in altered forest age structure and composition. Record runoff in 2011 exceeded reservoir capacity on the Upper and Middle Missouri, leading...

Seasonal phenotypic flexibility in small birds produces a winter phenotype with elevated maximum cold-induced metabolic rates (=summit metabolism, sum). Temperature and photoperiod are candidates for drivers of seasonal phenotypes, but their relative impacts on metabolic variation are unknown. We examined photoperiod and temperature effects on sum,...