Clark Rushing

University of Georgia | UGA · Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources

Understanding migratory connectivity, or the linkage of populations between seasons, is critical for effective conservation and management of migratory wildlife. A growing number of tools are available for understanding where migratory individuals and populations occur throughout the annual cycle. Integration of the diverse measures of migratory mo...

Shrinking saline lakes provide irreplaceable habitat for waterbird species globally. Disentangling the effects of wetland habitat loss from other drivers of waterbird population dynamics is critical for protecting these species in the face of unprecedented changes to saline lake ecosystems, ideally through decision‐making frameworks that identify e...

Identifying genetic conservation units (CUs) in threatened species is critical for the preservation of adaptive capacity and evolutionary potential in the face of climate change. However, delineating CUs in highly mobile species remains a challenge due to high rates of gene flow and genetic signatures of isolation by distance. Even when CUs are del...

Documenting and understanding sex-specific variation in migratory phenology is important for predicting avian population dynamics. In spring, males often arrive on the breeding grounds before females (protandry), though whether these patterns result from fitness benefits versus sex-specific constraints on arrival timing remains poorly understood. S...

The value of information is a central concept in decision analysis, used to quantify how much the expected outcome of a decision would be improved if epistemic uncertainty could be resolved prior to committing to a course of action. One of the challenges, however, in quantitative analysis of the value of information is that the calculations are dem...

Recent technological advances have led to a rapid increase in the collection of capture–recapture data in continuous time. Unlike traditional capture–recapture data, the detection times from these technologies are themselves random variables and analysis of these data, therefore, requires models that properly account for stochasticity in both state...

As migratory species move through the stages of their annual cycle, individuals often display variation in the degree to which they remain in proximity to one another, a phenomenon called migratory connectivity. We show scale dependence in the strength of migratory connectivity in Painted Buntings (Passerina ciris), a North American passerine with...

Forests of eastern North America have been negatively impacted by excessive white-tailed deer browsing for decades. Previous studies have shown how deer-driven changes to forest structure, plant species composition, and microhabitat negatively impact forest birds. However, most experimental studies used relatively small plot sizes with few replicat...

Background Migratory connectivity describes the extent to which portions of a migratory population that are spatially associated during one stage of the annual cycle remain associated during other stages of the annual cycle. The strength of migratory connectivity may vary spatially across a species’ range and temporally as individuals move through...

Archival geolocators have transformed the study of small, migratory organisms but analysis of data from these devices requires bias correction because tags are only recovered from individuals that survive and are re-captured at their tagging location. We show that integrating geolocator recovery data and mark–resight data enables unbiased estimates...

Individuals that disperse long distances from their natal site must select breeding patches with no prior knowledge of patch suitability. Despite decades of theoretical studies examining which cues dispersing individuals should use to select breeding patches, few empirical studies have tested the predictions of these theories at spatial scales rele...

Ensuring the recruitment of desired tree species is a primary goal when considering successful regeneration of timber harvests. Deer populations that are overabundant relative to forage availability within their local landscapes pose a considerable challenge to successful forest regeneration. We evaluated the short-term (<10 years) impact of white-...

Archival geolocators have transformed the study of small, migratory organisms but analysis of data from these devices requires bias correction because tags are only recovered from individuals that survive and are re-captured at their tagging location. We show that integrating geolocator recovery data and mark-resight data enables unbiased estimates...

Significance Over the past half century, populations of neotropical migratory birds in North America have plummeted while populations of resident species have largely remained stable. We show that resident and migratory birds in eastern North America have responded differently to climate change over this period, with the ranges of resident species...

In response to global habitat loss, many governmental and non‐governmental organizations have implemented land acquisition programs to protect critical habitats permanently for priority species. The ability of these protected areas to meet future management objectives may be compromised if the effects of climate change are not considered in acquisi...

Species distributions are determined by the interaction of multiple biotic and abiotic factors, which produces complex spatial and temporal patterns of occurrence. As habitats and climate change due to anthropogenic activities, there is a need to develop species distribution models that can quantify these complex range dynamics. In this paper, we d...

Substantial effort has been dedicated to developing reliable monitoring schemes for North American bird populations, but our ability to monitor bird populations in the boreal forest remains limited because of the sparsity of long-term data sets, particularly in northerly regions. Given the importance of the boreal forest for many migratory birds, w...

Species distributions are determined by the interaction of multiple biotic and abiotic factors, which produces complex spatial and temporal patterns of occurrence. As habitats and climate change due to anthropogenic activities, there is a need to develop species distribution models that can quantify these complex range dynamics. In this paper, we d...

Long-distance migration is a common phenomenon across the animal kingdom but the scale of annual migratory movements has made it difficult for researchers to estimate survival rates during these periods of the annual cycle. Estimating migration survival is particularly challenging for small-bodied species that cannot carry satellite tags, a group t...

The strength of migratory connectivity is a measure of the cohesion of populations among phases of the annual cycle, including breeding, migration, and wintering. Many Nearctic‐Neotropical species have strong migratory connectivity between breeding and wintering phases of the annual cycle. It is less clear if this strength persists during migration...

Technological advancements have spurred rapid growth in the study of migratory connectivity, the linkage of individuals and populations between seasons of the annual cycle. The strength of migratory connectivity is a measure of the co‐occurrence of populations throughout the annual cycle and can be represented by a correlation of the distances betw...

Untangling the spatial and temporal processes that influence population dynamics of migratory species is challenging, because changes in abundance are shaped by variation in vital rates across heterogeneous habitats and throughout the annual cycle. We developed a full-annual-cycle, integrated population model and used demographic data collected bet...

Determining the geographic connections between breeding and nonbreeding populations, termed migratory connectivity, is critical to advancing our understanding of the ecology and conservation of migratory species. Assignment models based on stable isotopes historically have been an important tool for studying migratory connectivity of small-bodied s...

In migratory species, breeding and non-breeding locations are geographically separate, yet the effects of conditions from one stage may carry over to affect a subsequent stage. Ideally, to understand the mechanisms and implications of ‘carry-over effects’, one would need to follow individuals throughout the year, quantify potential environmental ca...

The following code provides a step-by-step guide to performing the analysis presented in our manuscript. We have done out best to clearly annotate each step so that the reviewers can fully interpret our methods and our results. Once accepted, we will include a modified version of this document as a supplement so that readers will have access to our...

Long-distance breeding and natal dispersal play central roles in many ecological and evolutionary processes, including gene flow, population dynamics, range expansion, and individual responses to fluctuating biotic and abiotic conditions. However, the relative contribution of long-distance dispersal to these processes depends on the ability of disp...

Long-distance breeding and natal dispersal play central roles in many ecological and evolutionary processes, including gene flow, population dynamics, range expansion, and individual responses to fluctuating biotic and abiotic conditions. However, the relative contribution of long-distance dispersal to these processes depends on the ability of disp...

Worldwide, migratory species are undergoing rapid declines but understanding the factors driving these declines is hindered by missing information about migratory connectivity and the lack of data to quantify environmental processes across the annual cycle. Here, we combined range-wide information about migratory connectivity with global remote-sen...

Whatever their size and the ecosystem they live in, all organisms may disperse at some stage of their life cycle. Dispersal dynamics are to a varying extent dependent on organismal size, life history, ecological niche, survival capacities and phylogeny. Moves towards a synthesis in dispersal ecology have focussed primarily on vertebrates and higher...

Whatever their size and the ecosystem they live in, all organisms may disperse at some stage of their life cycle. Dispersal dynamics are to a varying extent dependent on organismal size, life history, ecological niche, survival capacities and phylogeny. Moves towards a synthesis in dispersal ecology have focussed primarily on vertebrates and higher...

Long-distance breeding and natal dispersal play central roles in many ecological and evolutionary processes, including gene flow, population dynamics, range expansion, and individual responses to fluctuating biotic and abiotic conditions. However, the relative contribution of long-distance dispersal to these processes depends on the ability of disp...

The concept of ‘natural’ populations is a foundation of modern ecology and conservation, with a large body of theoretical literature using these discrete demographic units to understand population dynamics and prioritize conservation strategies. To date, there are currently no objective methods for empirically delineating large‐scale population bou...

Whatever their size and the ecosystem they live in, all organisms may disperse at some stage of their life cycle. Dispersal dynamics are to a varying extent dependent on organismal size, life history, ecological niche, survival capacities and phylogeny. Moves towards a synthesis in dispersal ecology have focused primarily on vertebrates and higher...

Long-distance dispersal is a fundamental process in ecology and evolution but the factors that influence these movements remain poorly understood in most species. We used stable hydrogen isotopes to quantify the rate and direction of long- distance immigration in a breeding population of American redstarts and to test whether the settlement decisio...

The processes by which individuals select breeding sites have important consequences for individual tness as well as population‐ and community‐dynamics. Although there is increasing evidence that many animal species use information acquired from conspecics to assess the suitability of potential breeding sites, little is known about how the use of t...

Patterns of migratory connectivity are a vital yet poorly understood component of the ecology and evolution of migratory birds. Our ability to accurately characterize patterns of migratory connectivity is often limited by the spatial resolution of the data but recent advances in probabilistic assignment approaches have begun pairing stable isotopes...