Nate Hough-Snee

• Ph.D
• Principal Scientist at Meadow Run Environmental

Across landscapes, riparian plant communities assemble under varying levels of disturbance, environmental stress, and resource availability, leading to the development of distinct riparian life-history guilds over evolutionary timescales. Identifying the environmental filters that exert selective pressures on specific riparian vegetation guilds is...

Stream classification provides a means to understand the diversity and distribution of channels and floodplains that occur across a landscape while identifying links between geomorphic form and process. Accordingly, stream classification is frequently employed as a watershed planning, management, and restoration tool. At the same time, there has be...

Instream wood promotes habitat heterogeneity through its influence on flow hydraulics and channel geomorphology. Within the Colum-bia River Basin, USA, wood is vital for the creation and maintenance of habitat for threatened salmonids. However, our understanding of the relative roles of the climatic, geomorphic, and ecological processes that source...

Abstract The construction of beaver dams facilitates a suite of hydrologic, hydraulic, geomorphic, and ecological feedbacks that increase stream complexity and channel–floodplain connectivity that benefit aquatic and terrestrial biota. Depending on where beaver build dams within a drainage network, they impact lateral and longitudinal connectivity...

Instream wood is a driver of geomorphic change in low-order streams, frequently altering morphodynamic processes. Instream wood is a frequently measured component of streams, yet it is a complex metric, responding to ecological and geomorphic forcings at a variety of scales. Here we seek to disentangle the relative importance of physical and biolog...

As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimila...

Safeguarding Earth’s tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We q...

Significance Invasive alien species pose major threats to biodiversity and ecosystems. However, identifying drivers of invasion success has been challenging, in part because species can achieve invasiveness in different ways, each corresponding to different aspects of demographics and distribution. Employing a multidimensional perspective of invasi...

Both historical and contemporary environmental conditions determine present biodiversity patterns, but their relative importance is not well understood. One way to disentangle their relative effects is to assess how different dimensions of beta-diversity relate to past climatic changes, i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional compositional dis...

Trees are of vital importance for ecosystem functioning and services at local to global scales, yet we still lack a detailed overview of the global patterns of tree diversity and the underlying drivers, particularly the imprint of paleoclimate. Here, we present the high-resolution (110 km) worldwide mapping of tree species richness, functional and...

Although trees are key to ecosystem functioning, many forests and tree species across the globe face strong threats. Preserving areas of high biodiversity is a core priority for conservation; however, different dimensions of biodiversity and varied conservation targets make it difficult to respond effectively to this challenge. Here, we (i) identif...

Background Forested wetlands support distinct vegetation and hydrology relative to upland forests and shrub-dominated or open water wetlands. Although forested wetland plant communities comprise unique habitats, these ecosystems’ community structure is not well documented in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Here I surveyed forested wetland vegetation to...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

The Chehalis River Basin Flood Damage Reduction Proposed Project is being proposed by the Chehalis River Basin Flood Control Zone District (Applicant) in the upper Chehalis Basin (Water Resource Inventory Area 23). The proposed project includes two primary actions: 1) a Flood Retention Expandable (FRE) facility and associated temporary reservoir at...

Environmental stressors associated with human land and water-use activities have degraded many riparian ecosystems across the western United States. These stressors include (i) the widespread expansion of invasive plant species that displace native vegetation and exacerbate streamflow and sediment regime alteration; (ii) agricultural and urban deve...

Riparian areas are hotspots of biological diversity that may serve as high quality habitat for fish and wildlife. The National Riparian Core Protocol (NRCP) provides tools and methods to assist natural resource professionals in sampling riparian vegetation and physical characteristics along wadeable streams. Guidance is provided for collecting basi...

Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and soil nitrogen (N) may confer competitive advantages to invasive species over native plant species. We conducted a two-way factorial experiment, growing the model invasive plant Arundo donax in CO2 growth chambers to test how CO2 and N availability interact to affect plant growth and biomass allocation....

Floodplain riparian ecosystems support unique vegetation communities and high biodiversity relative to terrestrial landscapes. Accordingly, estimating riparian ecosystem health across landscapes is critical for sustainable river management. However, methods that identify local riparian vegetation condition, an effective proxy for riparian health, h...

Invited talk at Binghamton Symposium on Connectivity in Geomorphology.

Context for fluvial connectivity

Flow regime, the magnitude, duration and timing of streamflow, controls the development of floodplain landforms on which riparian vegetation communities assemble. Streamflow scours and deposits sediment, structures floodplain soil moisture dynamics, and transports propagules. Flow regime interacts with environmental gradients like climate, land-use...

Supporting text, figures, and tables for manuscript. (DOCX)

Riparia surrounding low-order streams are dynamic environments that often support distinct biodiversity. Because of their connection to nearby uplands, riparian vegetation communities at these streams respond to many environmental filters—climatic, physical, chemical or biotic factors—that restrict what species can occur at a given location from wi...

Instream wood promotes habitat heterogeneity through its influence on flow hydraulics and channel geomorphology. Within the Columbia River Basin, USA, wood is vital for the creation and maintenance of habitat for threatened salmonids. However, our understanding of the relative roles of the climatic, geomorphic, and ecological processes that source...

Instream wood promotes habitat heterogeneity through its influence on flow hydraulics and channel geomorphology. Within the Columbia River Basin, USA, wood is vital for the creation and maintenance of habitat for threatened salmonids. However, our understanding of the relative roles of the climatic, geomorphic, and ecological processes that source...

Stream classification provides a means to understand the diversity and distribution of channels and floodplains that occur across a landscape while drawing linkages between geomorphic form and process. Accordingly, stream classification is frequently employed as a watershed planning, management, and restoration tool. At the same time, there has bee...

Stream classification provides a means to understand the diversity and distribution of channels and floodplains that occur across a landscape while drawing linkages between geomorphic form and process. Accordingly, stream classification is frequently employed as a watershed planning, management, and restoration tool. At the same time, there has bee...

Across landscapes, riparian plant communities assemble under varying levels of disturbance, environmental stress, and resource availability, leading to the development of distinct riparian life-history guilds. Identifying the environmental filters that exert selective pressures and favor specific vegetation guilds within riverscapes is a critical s...

Across landscapes, riparian plant communities assemble under varying levels of disturbance, environmental stress, and resource availability, leading to the development of distinct riparian life-history guilds. Identifying the environmental filters that exert selective pressures and favor specific vegetation guilds within riverscapes is a critical s...

Stream classification provide a means to understand the diversity and distributions of channel and floodplains that occur across a landscape while drawing linkages between geomorphic form and process. Accordingly, stream classification is frequently employed as a watershed planning tool. In practice, a variety of frameworks are available to manager...

Across landscapes, riparian plant communities assemble under varying levels of disturbance, environmental stress, and resource availability, leading to the development of distinct riparian life-history guilds. Identifying the environmental filters that exert selective pressures and favor specific vegetation guilds within riverscapes is a critical s...

The western United States is among the most geographically diverse regions in the world. This heterogeneous landscape has fascinated biogeographers and explorers for centuries, yet poses daunting challenges for environmental managers in search of generalizable frameworks for understanding riparian plant composition, diversity, and resilience. Numer...

Restoring forest vegetation within denuded settings requires identifying the abiotic factors that limit plant establishment (Bradshaw 1997, Whisenant 1999). In heavily disturbed sites such as quarries and gravel pits that have been denuded of native soils, degraded soil processes may limit planted tree seedling survival or growth (Williamson et al....

Riparian vegetation may recover quickly from disturbance when the disturbance vector is removed or reduced. Grazing is a disturbance that removes plant biomass through herbivory, while overgrazing is a more severe disturbance that can deplete plant propagule pools and inhibit plant community recovery. We tested the hypothesis that riparian vegetati...

Archer, E.K., N. Hough-Snee*, A. Van Wagenen, R. Lokteff, B.B. Roper. 2012. The PACFISH/INFISH Biological Opinion (PIBO) Effectiveness Monitoring Program and Invasive Plant Species Detection: A Retrospective Summary 2003-2011. USDA Forest Service, Logan, UT. 26pp.

Hough-Snee, N., A.L. Long and R. Pond. 2012. Passive soil manipulation influences the successional trajectories of forest communities at a denuded former campsite. Ecological Restoration 30(1): 9-12.

Hough-Snee, N., A.L. Long, L. Jeroue and K. Ewing. 2011. Mounding alters environmental filters that drive plant community development in a novel grassland. Ecological Engineering 37(11): 1932-1936. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2011.06.013

Hough-Snee, N., R. Pond and J.W. Jacobson. 2010. The Stillaguamish Big Trees Project: watershed scale riparian restoration, Washington, USA Ecological Restoration: 28(3): 243-245.

Passive site manipulation is an ecological restoration approach that strives to improve heavily degraded sites by altering physical conditions to encourage the establishment of autogenic ecosystem processes. Passive restoration approaches have been successfully used in numerous ecosystems to alter soil nutrition, moisture retention, and propagule r...

Earthen mounds are commonly used in ecological restoration to increase environmental heterogeneity, create favorable microclimates and retain soil resources that promote plant establishment. Although mounding is commonly employed in restoration, few microtopography studies focus on the long-term effects of mounding on restored plant community devel...

In prairie restoration, site preparation is a key step in altering environmental conditions to favor the establishment of desirable plants over invasive species. Initial site preparation is especially important in restoration scenarios where resources may not exist for follow-up treatments and consistent maintenance. In the Pacific Northwest, for e...

From our experiences, awl-fruit sedge (Carex stipata Muhl. ex Willd. [Cyperaceae]) is an easily propagated wetland plant in Washington State. Because seeds can be collected from the same growth year, germinated without stratification, and grown into plants, C. stipata can be quickly propagated during summer for fall and winter outplanting. We belie...

Howell, J. and N. Hough-Snee. 2009. Learning from a landfill: ecological restoration and education at Seattle?s Union Bay Natural Area. SERNews: The Newsletter of the Society for Ecological Restoration International 23(2): 4-5.