Kevin S. White

Kevin S. White
University of Alaska Southeast/University of Victoria

BS, MS

About

45
Publications
14,517
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
728
Citations
Introduction
Kevin White is a wildlife ecologist specializing in the study of mountain goat and moose ecology in coastal Alaska.
Additional affiliations
October 1999 - February 2022
Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Position
  • Wildlife Research Biologist
Education
September 1997 - May 1999
University of Nevada, Reno
Field of study
  • Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences - Wildlife Ecology
September 1989 - December 1994
Humboldt State University
Field of study
  • Wildlife Biology (Minor: Botany)

Publications

Publications (45)
Article
Full-text available
The costs and benefits of alternative migratory strategies are often framed in the context of top-down and bottom-up effects on individual fitness. This occurs because migration is considered a costly behavioral strategy that presumably confers explicit benefits to migrants in the form of either decreased predation risk (predation risk avoidance hy...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological theory predicts that individual survival should vary between sex and age categories due to differences in allocation of nutritional resources for growth and reproductive activities. During periods of environmental stress, such relationships maybe exacerbated, and affect sex and age classes differently. We evaluated support for hypotheses...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change represents a primary threat to species persistence and biodiversity at a global scale. Cold adapted alpine species are especially sensitive to climate change and can offer key “early warning signs” about deleterious effects of predicted change. Among mountain ungulates, survival, a key determinant of demographic performance, may be i...
Article
Full-text available
Snow is a major, climate-sensitive feature of the Earth’s surface and catalyst of fundamentally important ecosystem processes. Understanding how snow influences sentinel species in rapidly changing mountain ecosystems is particularly critical. Whereas effects of snow on food availability, energy expenditure, and predation are well documented, we re...
Article
Full-text available
Acquisition of field data and analytical methods needed for conservation and management of wildlife populations represent significant challenges, particularly for species that inhabit landscapes that are difficult to access or species that persist in small, isolated populations. In such instances, integrating diverse and complementary data streams,...
Article
Full-text available
Caring for newborn offspring hampers resource acquisition of mammalian females, curbing their ability to meet the high energy expenditure of early lactation. Newborns are particularly vulnerable, and, among the large herbivores, ungulates have evolved a continuum of neonatal antipredator tactics, ranging from immobile hider (such as roe deer fawns...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change disproportionately affects northern and alpine environments, with faster rates of warming than the global average. Because alpine and northern species are particularly well adapted to cool temperatures, most species must modify their behavior when temperatures exceed a critical threshold. Evaluating how temperature increases affect s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mountain environments with snow avalanche hazard cover about 6% of Earth's land area and occur on all continents. Whereas human risks associated with avalanche hazard have been widely studied, little is known about how avalanche activity affects population dynamics in mountain wildlife. Globally, thirty-two species of mountain ungulates across 70 c...
Article
Full-text available
Both natural and anthropogenic forces can play a substantial role in the demographic history and current structure of a wildlife population. Species with strict habitat requirements are especially susceptible to these impacts. Mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) in Alaska are of particular interest in this regard due to their influence on alpine e...
Article
Full-text available
Elucidating patterns of adult survival rates is key to understanding population dynamics of large mammals. We used data from 7 separate studies of mountain goats (Oreamnos amer-icanus) conducted from 2002 through 2022 in western Washington, USA, to quantify survival rates in relation to key biotic and abiotic factors using known fate models impleme...
Chapter
Full-text available
Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), and to a lesser extent mountain goats (Oreamanos americanus), historically occupied much of the mountainous rangelands of western North America. Both ungulates inhabit rugged terrain and feed on grasses, forbs, and browse. Bighorn sheep and mountain goats are widely recognized for their consumptive and non-consumpti...
Article
Human disturbance and climate change can impact populations by disrupting movement corridors and reducing important habitat. Characterizing how animals respond to such environmental changes is valuable for conservation as many species can experience reduced genetic diversity when deleterious habitat change occurs, leading to an increased likelihood...
Article
Full-text available
Potential negative artificial selection on horn size is a concern for many harvested ungulates. The mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) has distinct black horns, but targeting animals based on horn size in the field can be challenging. We analyzed over 23,000 horn records that included base circumference and total length, from which we also derived...
Article
Full-text available
The development, evaluation, and refinement of effective and humane capture methods for wildlife studies is important for increasing our capacity to understand and effectively manageand conserve wildlife populations. Carfentanil has been the primary agent used to chemically immobilize mountain goats ( Oreamnos americanus ) during the past 40 years....
Article
Full-text available
Understanding patterns of animal space use and range fidelity has important implications for species and habitat conservation. For species that live in highly seasonal environments, such as mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus), spatial use patterns are expected to vary in relation to seasonal changes in environmental conditions and sex‐ or age‐spec...
Article
Full-text available
Apex predators play keystone roles in ecosystems through top-down control, but the effects of apex omnivores on ecosystems could be more varied because changes in the resource base alter their densities and reverberate through ecosystems in complex ways. In coastal temperate ecosystems throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, anadromous salmon o...
Research
Understanding traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles in our modern world is fundamental to our understanding of their viability, as well as the role of humans as predators in structuring ecosystems. Here, we examine the factors that drive prey preferences of modern hunter-gatherer people by reviewing 85 published studies from 161 tropical, temperat...
Article
Full-text available
Winter recreation and tourism continue to expand worldwide, and where these activities overlap with valuable wildlife habitat, there is greater potential for conservation concerns. Wildlife populations can be particularly vulnerable to disturbance in alpine habitats as helicopters and snowmachines are increasingly used to access remote backcountry...
Article
Full-text available
The community of microorganisms in the gut is affected by host species, diet, and environment and is linked to normal functioning of the host organism. Although the microbiome fluctuates in response to host demands and environmental changes, there are core groups of microorganisms that remain relatively constant throughout the hosts lifetime. Rumin...
Article
Full-text available
In contrast to broad range expansion through translocations, many mountain goat ( Oreamnos americanus) populations have shown signs of decline. Recent documentation of pneumonia in mountain goats highlights their susceptibility to bacterial pathogens typically associated with bighorn sheep ( Ovis canadensis) epizootics. Respiratory pathogen communi...
Article
Full-text available
In salmon‐rich environments, which once spanned much of the Northern Hemisphere, bears occur at exceptionally high densities. Salmon, by growing bear populations, have the potential to exert wide‐ranging effects on ecosystem processes. Salmon‐supported bears provide seed dispersal services to plants, and bear scats containing thousands of seeds may...
Article
Full-text available
Industrial development can have important direct and indirect effects on wildlife populations. Resource selection function (RSF) modeling provides a powerful tool for assessing the effects of industrial development on spatial use patterns of wildlife. Among North American large mammal species, mountain goats Oreamnos americanus are particularly sen...
Article
Full-text available
In many temperate ecosystems animal carcasses resultant from wildlife harvest can provide a high-quality food source for myriad facultative scavengers. We investigated scavenger use of human-provisioned ungulate carrion from a fall moose (Alces alces) hunt during 2010 and 2011 on the Gustavus Forelands, Alaska, USA. Using data from remote cameras,...
Article
Full-text available
Female natal philopatry has often been implicated as an important factor in moose (Alces alces) home range formation, with many populations showing behavioral evidence of sympatric home ranges among related individuals. However, previous genetic studies have failed to detect genetic subpopulation structure, leading to questions as to whether philop...
Article
Full-text available
Numerous species of Sarcocystis have been reported from wild ruminants, but none has been named from the Rocky Mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus). Mature sarcocysts were found in frozen muscle samples of three of seven mountain goats from Alaska, USA. Two morphological types of sarcocysts were found; one had Sarcocystis cornagliai-like sarcocysts,...
Article
Full-text available
Radiocollared animals are frequently used to estimate detection probabilities in aerial surveys. The aircraft used to conduct these surveys may also have been used to aid in the capture of these animals, and recently captured animals may react to hearing or seeing the aircraft, changing their behavior in a way that calls into question the represent...
Article
Full-text available
In ungulates, the rut generally leads to increased intra and interpopulation movements for males. Because movements induce energetic costs and missed feeding opportunities, they could be an indication of male mating effort. We studied space use of 44 male mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) from three neighboring subpopulations in southeast Alaska...
Article
Full-text available
Since most wolf (Canis lupus) diet studies have been conducted in inland ecosystems, comparatively few data are available on diets of wolves in coastal systems. We investigated the diet of wolves in Glacier Bay, Alaska, from 12 May to 28 June in both 2010 and 2011. Although we identified 12 different prey species, including birds and small to mediu...
Article
Full-text available
Landscape heterogeneity plays an integral role in shaping ecological and evolutionary processes. Despite links between the two disciplines, ecologists and population geneticists have taken different approaches to evaluating habitat selection, animal movement, and gene flow across the landscape. Ecologists commonly use statistical models such as res...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) are among the most culturally and economically important large mammal species in Alaska. Due to their low population growth rates and relatively high degree of sensitivity to natural and anthropogenic disturbance, resource management decisions must be carefully evaluated to ensure sustainable populations. In thi...
Article
Full-text available
Human-mediated movement of wildlife is a common practice in North America. Some translocations have occurred where local populations were thought to be extinct or simply not present. In Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago, mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) were not considered indigenous and were introduced to Baranof Island in 1923. However, a range-...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT Snow affects the nutritional ecology of northern ungulates during winter through burial of important winter forages. We used nonlinear regression analyses to model snow-burial dynamics of blueberry (Vaccinium spp.) browse biomass, a key winter food item of Sitka black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitchensis) in southeastern Alaska, USA...
Article
Full-text available
Salmon runs influence the ecology of several mammalian species in Southeast Alaska, but little is known about the effect of salmon runs on avian predators. We tested the prediction that reproductive performance of American dippers (Cinclus mexicanus) nesting along stream reaches that have seasonal populations of spawning salmon is higher than that...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Fundamental differences in fitness requirements between male and female individuals result in sex-linked ecological variation within many species of large mammals. Determining the extent to which sex-specific requirements alter behavioral strategies and subsequent spatial use patterns has important implications for conservation and management of sp...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Moose populations in southeastern Alaska have a relatively short history as a result of recent de-glaciation of regional landscapes. The colonization trajectories of such populations have typically been characterized by irruptive fluctuations. That is, following a period of initial establishment, populations generally have increased rapidly (possib...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We are studying how selective foraging by moose is affecting soil nutrient dynamics in the Gustavus forelands, where current over-winter moose densities (ca. 3.9 animals/km2) are among the highest recorded in Alaska. We examined variation in inorganic N and microbial N pools between paired exclosure-control plots located in willow thicket habitats,...
Article
Full-text available
We report three instances of Wolf predation on mustelids in Alaska; two involved Wolverines and another involved an American Marten. Such observations are rare and in previous studies usually have been documented indirectly. This account provides insight into the potential role of Wolves in influencing mesocarnivore communities in northern environm...
Article
Full-text available
To maximize fitness, mothers must both provision and protect neonates, demands that may be in conflict, particularly in systems that still experience high levels of natural predation. Whether variation in offspring behaviour alters this putative conflict is not known. The objective of this study was to test hypotheses about the extent to which neon...
Article
Full-text available
We studied behavioral and ecologic effects of differential predation pressure on moose (Alces alces gigas) in the eastern Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska, during 1996-1998. Annual mortality from grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) and wolf (Canis lupus) predation was higher for solitary yearling moose than for dependent yearlings (those with adults) and solita...

Network

Cited By