Mark A. Kaemingk

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of North Dakota

Prevention is emphasized as the most cost-effective way to limit human-mediated introductions and negative impacts of invasive species, but preventative actions are often implemented in a spatially and temporally imperfect manner. We reviewed the current knowledge of preventative actions (regulations, education, and inspections) and received modifi...

Water temperature is an important factor that can impact fish growth, survival, and reproduction. Fish have an optimum temperature they prefer to inhabit to maximize their growth efficiency. Due to increasing climate temperatures, the southern range for both cool and warm water fishes is expected to shift north. Once moving to higher latitudes, fis...

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is characterized by numerous shallow lakes and wetlands that play a crucial role in regional hydrology, shaping aquatic communities, and supporting outdoor recreation. Climate variability affects these water bodies through complex processes such as snowmelt, infiltration, evaporation, and fill-and-spill dynamics. Ho...

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), characterized by numerous shallow lakes and wetlands, plays a critical role in the region's hydrology. The hydrological response to changing temperature and precipitation is complex, influenced by factors that include fill-and-spill dynamics, frozen and unfrozen soil infiltration, snow redistribution, snowmelt, and...

The prevention of aquatic invasive species is one of the most cost-effective management strategies for reducing negative ecological, economic, and social impacts to freshwater ecosystems. The release of leftover baitfish via the live bait trade has been identified as a high-risk pathway for introducing invasive species beyond physical barriers (e.g...

Harvest regulation is one of the primary tools that natural resource managers use to manage exploited fish and wildlife populations. Unfortunately, the desired results of harvest regulations are frequently not realized. We contend that a broader and more thorough understanding of anglers could improve the success of harvest regulations. Using a cas...

Outdoor recreation provides societal benefits that are often measured by the amount of use natural resource systems receive. Still, the amount of resource use natural resource systems receive is often unknown or unstudied. Monitoring and quantifying resource use is often logistically difficult and costly but is paramount to optimize societal benefi...

Economic assessments are rarely applied to inland recreational fisheries for management purposes, especially when compared to fish, habitat, and creel assessments, yet economic assessments can provide critical information for management decisions. We provide a brief overview of economic value, key terminology, and existing economic techniques to ad...

The size of an ecosystem affects ecological interactions, but less is known about how ecosystem size may affect social interactions. We posit that ecosystem size could serve as a basis for understanding and contextualizing social interactions, connecting how ecosystem size influences natural resource investment decisions and the use of ecosystem se...

Limited information and resources have caused many parks and protected areas (PPAs) to functionally manage recreationists as a single homogeneous group, despite potential negative social and ecological consequences. We aimed to evaluate the homogeneity of recreationists at the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) by 1) quantifying frequencies o...

Accounting for the variation of visitor conflicts and ecological disturbance of outdoor recreation activities across space and time can cause difficulty for managers seeking to make decisions in social-ecological systems (SESs). We develop a method to quantify and visualize social and ecological intensities resulting from outdoor recreation. We dem...

Natural resources such as waterbodies, public parks, and wildlife refuges attract people from varying distances on the landscape, creating “social‐ecological catchments.” Catchments have provided great utility for understanding physical and social relationships within specific disciplines. Yet, catchments are rarely used across disciplines, such as...

Aldo Leopold, famous ecologist and “father” of North American wildlife management, once said, “These are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.” Ever prescient, Leopold recognized that natural resource management is fundamentally about humans and their relationship with nature well bef...

Resilience thinking has generated much interest among scientific communities, yet most resilience concepts have not materialized into management applications. We believe that using resilience concepts to characterize systems and the social and ecological processes affecting them is a way to integrate resilience into better management decisions. Thi...

Recreational angler surveys typically collect information on how anglers access a fishery. Yet, it is unclear how this information is useful for fisheries management and conservation. The objective of this study was to compare behavior (e.g., party size, time fished, and numbers of fish released and harvested) of bank and boat anglers, representing...

Most fishery regulations aim to control angler harvest. Yet, we lack a basic understanding of what actually determines the angler’s decision to harvest or release fish caught. We used XGBoost, a machine learning algorithm, to develop a predictive angler harvest–release model by taking advantage of an extensive recreational fishery data set (24 wate...

Perrion MA, Kaemingk MA, Koupal KD, Schoenebeck CW, Bickford NA. 2019. Use of otolith chemistry to assess recruitment and habitat use of a white bass fishery in a Nebraska reservoir. Lake Reserv Manage. XX:XX–XX. Managing fisheries that exhibit variable annual recruitment is challenging, and maintenance stockings are often prescribed to minimize in...

Recreational fisheries are complex adaptive systems that are inherently difficult to manage because of heterogeneous user groups (consumptive vs. nonconsumptive) that use patchily distributed resources on the landscape (lakes, rivers, coastlines). There is a need to identify which system components can effectively predict and be used to manage nonl...

Many freshwater organisms have a life-history stage that can disperse through seawater. This has obvious benefits for colonization and connectivity of fragmented sub-populations, but requires a physiologically challenging migration across a salinity boundary. We consider the role of landscape boundaries between freshwater and seawater habitats, and...

Creel data collected from 34 Nebraska waterbodies during 2009-2013

Recreational fisheries are traditionally managed at local scales, but more effective management could be achieved using a cross‐scale approach. To do this, we must first understand how local processes scale up to influence landscape patterns between anglers and resources. We highlight how population‐based synchrony methods, used in conjunction with...

Stahr KJ, Kaemingk MA. 2017. An evaluation of emergent macrophytes and use among groups of aquatic taxa. Lake Reserv Manage. 00:1–10. Aquatic vegetation serves an important ecological role. Previous research on the interactions of macrophytes and aquatic organisms has focused primarily on submersed macrophytes due to their structural complexity and...

Little is known about how hatch phenology (e.g., the start, peak, and duration of hatching) could influence subsequent recruitment of freshwater fishes into a population. We used two commonly sympatric fish species that exhibit different hatching phenologies to examine recruitment across multiple life stages. Nine yellow perch (Perca flavescens) an...

Catch per unit effort for yellow perch and bluegill year classes (2004–2012) sampled across life stages (larval, age-0, age-1, age-2) from Pelican Lake, Nebraska, USA from 2004 through 2013. No samples (NS) were collected for either species during 2014 to estimate age-2 abundances for the 2012-year class. (DOCX)

Fisheries science is a diverse field that requires individuals to be knowledgeable in many disciplines in addition to fisheries (e.g., economics, sociology, political science, chemistry; Kelso and Murphy 1988). This challenges students attempting to enter a career in fisheries, as well as academic institutions and eventual employers, to develop bot...

Natural resource professionals have frequently criticized universities for poorly preparing graduates to succeed in their jobs. We surveyed members of the American Fisheries Society to determine which job skills and knowledge of academic topics employers, students, and university faculty members deemed most important to early-career success of fish...

Middle-out effects or a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes create many theoretical and empirical challenges in the realm of trophic ecology. We propose using specific autecology or species trait (i.e. behavioural) information to help explain and understand trophic dynamics that may involve complicated and non-unidirectional trophic int...

Much uncertainty exists around how fish communities in shallow lakes will respond to climate change. In this study, we modelled the effects of increased water temperatures on consumption and growth rates of two piscivores (northern pike [Esox lucius] and largemouth bass [Micropterus salmoides]) and examined relative effects of consumption by these...

Year-class strength of many sport fishes, including Yellow Perch Perca flavescens, is often indexed as the relative abundance of age-0 individuals at various stages of development (e.g., larvae and juveniles). However, these estimates occur prior to the first overwinter period, which has been recognized as a critical period for other teleost fishes...

Throughout their range, Yellow Perch Perca flavescens are an important ecological and economic component of many fisheries, but they often exhibit highly variable recruitment. Much research effort has been devoted to better understanding the mechanisms responsible for these erratic recruitment patterns, yet few studies have examined this process at...

In today's job market, having a successful career in the fisheries and wildlife sciences is becoming more dependent on obtaining an advanced degree. As a result, competition for getting accepted into a graduate program is fierce. Our objective for this study was to provide prospective graduate students some insights as to what qualifications or att...

Substantial mortality can occur in age-0 fish populations during their first year of life, especially in winter; this can potentially influence overall recruitment into the adult population. As such, we compared relative abundances be- tween fall and spring catches of sympatric juvenile bluegill Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque and yellow perch Perca...

Fishes can exhibit many forms of plasticity to maximize fitness. However, limited information exists on the ability of freshwater fish to adjust spawning behavior and characteristics (e.g., timing, duration, magnitude of spawning events) to minimize mortality of recruits and ultimately maximize fitness. We wanted to test the life history hypothesis...

AFS President John Boreman established the AFS Special Committee on Educational Requirements in November 2012 to help ensure that people entering the future workforce will be prepared to tackle issues facing fisheries. The first two objectives for ths committee are: 1) assemble a list of North American colleges and universities offering undergradua...

Recruitment of yellow perch Perca flavescens has been of importance to fisheries biologists due to their ecological value as prey for other species of fish and economic importance as a highly sought sportfish. Yellow perch recruitment is often highly variable in many systems and is typified by strong, weak, or even missing year classes. Much resear...

Fluctuating water levels can influence primary productivity, zooplankton, and macroinvertebrate communities in reservoir systems; however, information is lacking on the relationship between water level and these variables in natural lakes. Therefore, we attempted to link natural lake water levels to these study variables using a temporal and spatia...

Abstract – Bluegill Lepomis macrochirus commonly exhibit fractional spawning (i.e., multiple peak spawning events each year), but the role of timing and the duration of spawning events on recruitment to the adult life stage is not well understood despite the importance of timing at earlier life stages. Our objective was to identify the importance o...

Publishing research is the final step in the scientific process and is used as the primary means for disseminating research findings to the scientific community. Publishing can embody many personal motivations (e.g., gratification, seeing a finished product in print, desire to further science) for authors as well as professional benefits (e.g., pro...

Information regarding nest site selection for bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus) is limited. Therefore, our study identified important characteristics of bluegill nest sites in a shallow, natural lake - West Long Lake, Nebraska, USA, on the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge. Bluegill nest colonies were identified visually from a boat and nine abiotic...

Aquatic invertebrate communities are important to shallow lake ecosystem form and function, providing vital components to the food web and thereby important to achieving lake management goals. We characterized lake invertebrate communities and physicochemical variables in six Nebraska Sandhill lakes and examined these characteristics within an alte...

Acute reductions in water temperature (i.e. cold fronts) may influence larval fish survival directly via limits on physiological tolerance or indirectly by acting as a sublethal stressor. The primary objective was to quantify survivorship of yellow perch yolk-sac fry exposed to two different temperature declines (4 and 8°C) and compare survivorship...

Substantial mortality can occur in age-0 fish populations during their first year of life, especially in winter; this can potentially influence overall recruitment into the adult population. As such, we compared relative abundances between fall and spring catches of sympatric juvenile bluegill Lepomis macrochirus Rafinesque and yellow perch Perca f...

Bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus) and yellow perch (Perca flavescens) populations are often sympatric in the Great Plains region of the U.S.A. and portions of Canada; however, very little attention has been given to potential interactions between these species for available resources, especially during the early life stages. Relationships between age-...

Common carp Cyprinus carpio influence aquatic ecosystems through middle-out effects. Previous work on the effects of common carp primarily focused on invertebrates and water quality at small spatial scales (i.e., mesocosms) with fewer studies identifying their influence on aquatic biota with whole-lake experiments. We used mensurative and manipulat...

Bluegill Lepomis macrochirus are typically considered protracted spawners. Understanding survival, growth, and subsequent recruitment of larval bluegill cohorts to the juvenile stage is essential to better predict year-class strength, thus allowing for improved management practices. We examined cohort contribution of larval bluegill to the juvenile...

Examining interactions between species is important from ecological and management perspectives. Therefore, our objectives were to examine diet and habitat overlap between juvenile bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus) and yellow perch (Perca flavescens) in Pelican Lake, Nebraska while also examining bluegill and perch spatial alignment with prey resource...

1. When available, Daphnia spp. are often preferred by age‐0 yellow perch and bluegill sunfish because of energetic profitability. We hypothesised that predation by age‐0 yellow perch could lead to a midsummer decline (MSD) of Daphnia spp. and that priority effects may favour yellow perch because they hatch before bluegill, allowing them to capital...

The ecological and economic importance of Great Lakes nearshore areas and the paucity of information on nearshore Lake Michigan fish assemblages prompted us to document changes that occurred from a historical time period (1969–1972, 1975, 1977, and 1984) to a recent period (2005–2008) in a nearshore northern Lake Michigan (Beaver Archipelago) fish...

Fish movement may vary across a wide array of aquatic ecosystems and may be related to the overall size of the system inhabited. We investigated movement of smallmouth bass in Lake Michigan because this information is lacking for larger systems. A total of 16 smallmouth bass were surgically implanted with ultrasonic transmitters within the Beaver A...

Our objective was to determine if larval yellow perch abundance was related to Daphnia spp. abundance. If larval yellow perch abundance was related to Daphnia spp. densities, we then wanted to determine if this reduced prey availability and would limit growth of earlier hatched bluegill (e.g., first weekly cohort to emerge). We measured chlorophyll...

Passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags are commonly used to monitor growth, habitat use, activity rates, and survival of individual fish. However, for successful completion of research objectives, the tags must be retained and must not affect fish growth or survival. We compared the effects of PIT tagging location on tag retention, growth, and s...

Information on smallmouth bass nesting ecology is lacking in northern Lake Michigan, despite available information for other Great Lakes ecosystems. Our objectives were to identify factors that influenced nesting sites and nest success in a smallmouth bass population in northern Lake Michigan. Temperature, substrate firmness, and lake bottom rugosi...

The objectives of the present study were to determine if spatial differences existed between zooplankton, larval yellow perch Perca flavescens and bluegill Lepomis macrochirus (<13 mm total length, L(T)) in Pelican Lake (332 ha), NE, U.S.A. It was hypothesized that wind could act as a transport mechanism for larval fishes in this shallow lake, beca...

Spatial overlap between age-0 fishes and prey resources are beneficial for growth and subsequent recruitment. Our objectives were to determine if age-0 bluegill and yellow perch relative abundance and mean length differed among four habitat types. If differences were detected, we then wanted to relate these differences to prey availability. A total...

Common carp Cyprinus carpio is a nonnative invasive nuisance species to North America. Many authors have documented the detrimental affects of common carp invasions on waterfowl habitats (Chamberlain 1948; Robel 1961), game fish habitat (Cahn 1929), and the overall decline in native fishes (Bernstein and Olson 2001; Koehn 2004). Common carp reduce...

There is an expansive and expanding delta at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers in the Lewis and Clark Reservoir. The delta provides diverse aquatic habitat that is somewhat similar to the historic Missouri River and to remnant river habitats. As such, the delta may have relatively high fish species diversity compared to lentic rese...