Eric Douglas Stolen

• Ph.D. Wildlife Ecol. and Cons.
• Kennedy Space Center

The migrations of many coastal sharks, while often influenced by ocean temperature, remain poorly defined, limiting the ability to plan for changes in stock distribution and habitat quality as oceans warm. This study leverages regional-scale acoustic telemetry networks to document the timing and sea surface temperature (SST) associated with annual...

The federally threatened southeastern beach mouse Peromyscus polionotus niveiventris occupies just a fraction of its former range along Florida’s Atlantic coast, mostly within the 72 km of continuous coastline on federal lands of the Cape Canaveral Barrier Island Complex. Although believed to be caused by loss and degradation of habitat associated...

Single‐visit surveys of plots are often used for estimating the abundance of species of conservation concern. Less‐than‐perfect availability and detection of individuals can bias estimates if not properly accounted for. We developed field methods and a Bayesian model that accounts for availability and detection bias during single‐visit visual plot...

Timely detection and understanding of causes for population decline are essential for effective wildlife management and conservation. Assessing trends in population size has been the standard approach, but we propose that monitoring population health could prove more effective. We collated data from 7 bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) populat...

Fecundity, the number of young produced by a breeding pair during a breeding season, is a primary component in evolutionary and ecological theory and applications. Fecundity can be influenced by many environmental factors and requires long‐term study due to the range of variation in ecosystem dynamics. Fecundity data often include a large proportio...

Adult nonbreeders are important for the stability and conservation of many species despite that their functional roles are often undervalued. Nonbreeders can buffer breeding population sizes and help their kin raise new generations of offspring, but in high numbers can compete and have negative effects. Long‐term studies are useful for elucidating...

Common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus truncatus) inhabiting the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) estuarine system along the east coast of Florida are impacted by anthropogenic activities and have had multiple unexplained mortality events. Given this, managers need precise estimates of demographic and abundance parameters. Mark-recapture photo-ide...

Species displaying temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) are especially vulnerable to the effects of a rapidly changing global climate due to their profound sensitivity to thermal cues during development. Predicting the consequences of climate change for these species, including skewed offspring sex ratios, depends on understanding how clim...

Understanding the movements of adult fish around marine reserves is central to evaluating the importance of these areas to conservation but is difficult to quantify in many coastal settings. We used a 300 km long passive acoustic telemetry network to measure site fidelity and dispersal distances of adult red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus), black drum (...

Accurate estimates of abundance are critical to species management and conservation. Common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus truncatus) inhabiting the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) estuarine system along the east coast of Florida are impacted by anthropogenic activities and have had multiple unexplained mortality events, necessitating precise es...

Habitat occupancy models, designed to deal with non‐detection of a target species in occupied sites, have been expanded to allow for false‐positive detections when species are mistakenly detected in unoccupied sites. When a subset of the data are unambiguous detections, such occupancy models can produce reliable results. However, if not properly ac...

The Florida east coast terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin tequesta) is a rare and potentially endangered species that is difficult to survey because of poor detection probability and a patchy distribution. Like many rare species sampling programs, we apply a density and multistate occupancy sampling approach that considered the impacts of imperfect dete...

Track tubes are a noninvasive, efficient method to monitor populations of small mammals that can be implemented on a large landscape scale and are a cost-effective approach for certain sampling situations. As with all field sampling tools, modifications are made depending on research objectives, habitat being sampled, and target species. We conduct...

The study of crayfishes in their native habitats is limited, even if crayfishes are economically and ecologically important. Such is the case in southeastern USA, a center of global crayfish diversity. This study investigated model-estimated abundance and habitat associations of Procambarus paeninsulanus (Faxon, 1914) and P. fallax (Hagen, 1870) in...

The combined effects of fire history, climate, and landscape features (e.g., edges) on habitat specialists need greater focus in fire ecology studies, which usually only emphasize characteristics of the most recent fire. Florida scrub-jays are an imperiled, territorial species that prefer medium (1.2-1.7 m) shrub heights, which are dynamic because...

Society needs information about how vegetation communities in coastal regions will be impacted by hydrologic changes associated with climate change, particularly sea level rise. Due to anthropogenic influences which have significantly decreased natural coastal vegetation communities, it is important for us to understand how remaining natural commun...

Simulation results of the effect of number of sample pixels on predictions of the proportion of each community type for the 0.2 m increase in sea-level rise scenarios on the Cape Canaveral Barrier Island Complex. The black dots are the current proportions of each community type on the CCIBC landscape. The red symbols show the 95% confidence interva...

Simulation results of the effect of number of sample pixels on predictions of the proportion of each community type for the 0.4 m increase in sea-level rise scenarios on the Cape Canaveral Barrier Island Complex. The black dots are the current proportions of each community type on the CCIBC landscape. The red symbols show the 95% confidence interva...

Land cover type descriptions and community groupings. Land cover types highlighted in black were not combined with any other land cover types in our community analysis. Land cover types that were grouped into communities are highlighted by the same color. Blue = Freshwater wetlands, Orange = Oak scrub, Green = Pine Flatwoods, Red = Upland Forest. (...

Simulation results of the effect of number of sample pixels on predictions of the current proportion of each community type on the Cape Canaveral Barrier Island Complex. The black dots are the current proportions of each community type on the CCIBC landscape. The red symbols show the 95% confidence interval for predicted proportion under the no cha...

Simulation results of the effect of number of sample pixels on predictions of the proportion of each community type for the 1.2 m increase in sea-level rise scenarios on the Cape Canaveral Barrier Island Complex. The black dots are the current proportions of each community type on the CCIBC landscape. The red symbols show the 95% confidence interva...

Systematic long-term monitoring of abundance and distribution is essential to management and conservation and necessary to assess mortality trends and anthropogenic impacts for cetacean stock assessment. Line-transect aerial surveys (n = 42) were conducted to assess bottlenose dol-phin (Tursiops truncatus) abundance, distribu-tion, and group compos...

Reduction of fire hazard is becoming increasingly important in managed landscapes globally. Fuels reduction prescribed burn treatments are the most common form of reducing fire hazard on landscapes around the world but often result in homogenized fuel age structures and habitats. Alternatively, the size of unplanned fires, and hence fire hazard, ca...

We studied the population structure and historical demography of the last remaining core population of the threatened southeastern beach mouse (SEBM; Peromyscus polionotus niveiventris) located on a federally protected barrier island complex at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (MINWR) and Cape Canaveral Air Fo...

Despite the significant value of the southeastern United States’ red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) fishery, there is a lack of clinical blood chemistry data. This was the first study to assess plasma glucose values as an indicator of stress response to evaluate variation and the effect of reproductive activity for wild adult red drum in Florida. Red d...

Abstract Quantifying habitat occupancy of the southeastern beach mouse (Peromyscus polionotus niveiventris) is important for managing this threatened species throughout its limited range. Tracking tubes were used to detect the southeastern beach mouse in coastal areas on the federal lands of the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Statio...

Resolving the geographic extent and timing of coastal shark migrations, as well as their environmental cues, is essential for refining shark management strategies in anticipation of increasing anthropogenic stressors to coastal ecosystems. We employed a regional-scale passive acoustic telemetry array encompassing 300 km of the east Florida coast to...

The combined effects of habitat quality, breeder experience and sociobiology on population demography are poorly understood. Natural fire regimes, which influence habitat quality and sociobiology, have been replaced by controlled fire management in most ecosystems. Managing fire mosaics (vegetation at different ages since fire) can be important to...

Group foraging is common among wading birds, and the reasons why individuals forage in groups are of theoretical and practical interest. Although aggregations of foraging wading birds usually form within patches of high-quality habitat, individual wading birds can sometimes increase success by foraging near others. We investigated the hypothesis th...

With 28% of the 350 species of parrots considered threatened, numerous conservation efforts have been initiated for these species. Among these, the restoration or establishment of new populations has increasingly relied on reintroductions as a conservation strategy, often with mixed or uncertain results. We reviewed the results and methodologies of...

Wide-ranging snake species are particularly sensitive to landscape fragmentation, and understanding area requirements is important for their conservation. We used radiotelemetry to quantify how Eastern Indigo Snake home-range sizes were influenced by sex, land cover, and the length of time (weeks) individuals were radio tracked. We found that Easte...

Bird populations occupying managed transitional habitats often have low nest success because optimal habitat conditions are not maintained. In such cases, quantifying determinants of nest survival provides information for habitat maintenance or restoration. Our goal was to determine the current factors affecting nest survival in a managed but decli...

Information on the abundance and distribution of cetaceans is essential to management and conservation and necessary to assess mortality trends and anthropogenic impacts for stock assessment. Line-transect aerial surveys (n = 45) were conducted to assess bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) abundance, distribution, and group composition in the I...

Many ecosystems are influenced by disturbances that create specific successional states and habitat structures that species need to persist. Estimating transition probabilities between habitat states and modeling the factors that influence such transitions have many applications for investigating and managing disturbance-prone ecosystems. We identi...

The choices animals make in dispersal are of interest because they describe in part how populations adjust to a changing environment. We investigated which factors influence whether adult Florida Scrub-Jays delay breeding within their natal territories or disperse to breed. Factors considered included those pertaining to individuals (sex, age, pare...

Anthropogenic influences have altered most fire regimes. Fire management programs often try to mimic natural fire regimes to maintain fuels and sustain native fire-dependent species. Lightning is the natural ignition source in Florida, substantiating the need for understanding lightning fire incidence. Sixteen years of lightning data (19862003, exc...

We compared the density and biomass of resident fish in vegetated and unvegetated flooded habitats of impounded salt marshes in the northern Indian River Lagoon (IRL) Estuary of east-central Florida. A 1-m2 throw trap was used to sample fish in randomly located, paired sample plots (n = 198 pairs) over 5 seasons in 7 impoundments. We collected a to...

Foraging habitat selection of nesting Great Egrets (Ardea alba) and Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula) was investigated within an estuary with extensive impounded salt marsh habitat. Using a geographic information system, available habitat was partitioned into concentric bands at five, ten, and 15 km radius from nesting colonies to assess the relative ef...

Protected lands contain a large proportion of existing critical habitat for many wading bird species, but human activities in these areas have the potential to adversely effect these species. The effects of passing vehicles on the foraging behavior of wading birds was studied using observational and experimental methods at the Merritt Island Nation...

Mercury is a toxic metallic element that is known to bioaccumulate in many marine organisms. Mercury concentrations are routinely evaluated in Indian River Lagoon (IRL) fish, however, there are no published reports of these concentrations for IRL bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus (Montagu, 1821). Muscle (n = 30) and liver (n = 19) samples fro...

A basic element in the success of managing species of conservation concern is knowledge of the species' habitat occupancy Often, predictive species-habitat models are developed from GIS data sources that were intended for purposes other than predicting species habitat occupancy and are of inappropriate scale. In addition, the techniques used to qua...

From 1988 to 2002 we studied the breeding ecology of Florida Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens) on John F. Kennedy Space Center/Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. We examined phenology, clutch size, hatching failure rates, fledgling production, nest success, predation rates, sources egg and nestling mortality, and the effects of helpers on...

Communal roosts are important resources for local populations of the Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus), but these roosts are increasingly becoming the focus for complaints of wildlife damage. We studied movements of Black Vultures between communal roosts in Florida using mark-resight methods. We marked 416 Black Vultures with patagial tags at two co...

This report summarizes results of the first eleven years of monthly aerial surveys of wading bird use of foraging habitats within impoundments on the Kennedy Space Center/Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Some impoundments were used much more heavily by wading birds than were others. Analysis suggests that an increase in interspersion of ope...

Launches of Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS) have potential environmental effects. These could occur from direct impacts of launches or indirectly from habitat alterations. This report summarizes a three-year study (1995-1998) characterizing the environment, with particular attention to threatened and endangere...

Launches of Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS) have potential environmental effects that could arise from direct impacts of the launch exhaust (e.g., blast, heat), deposition of exhaust products of the solid rocket motors (hydrogen chloride, aluminum oxide), or other effects such as noise. Here we: 1) review prev...

A review of previous environmental work conducted at Patrick Air Force Base (PAFB) indicated that several threatened, endangered, or species of special concern occurred or had the potential to occur there. This study was implemented to collect more information on protected species at PAFB. A map of landcover types was prepared for PAFB using aerial...

Most wading birds (Ciconiiformes) in Florida are tied to wetland habitats, and thus, to wetland protection and management. I investigated factors that influence piscivorous wading bird's foraging habitat selection and use at three spatial scales, and reasons why individuals choose to forage with others. Field work was conducted within the northern...