Rachel Skubel

Washington Department of Natural Resources · Aquatic Resources

The key findings of the climate vulnerability assessment are: ● All species in the Gulf of Mexico are projected to experience high or very high exposure to climate-driven change in environmental variables. ● The primary environmental factors of concern include temperature, salinity, ocean acidification, and dissolved oxygen. ● Biological sensitivit...

Sharing Coral Disease Knowledge and Experience across U.S. Coral Jurisdictions

The Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease Semi Annual Newsletter shares coral disease knowledge and experience across the Caribbean. The newsletter highlights major updates, innovations, and accomplishments in coral disease response, prevention, and preparedness efforts. It is geared towards an external audience with the goal of increasing awareness.

Marine conservation sciences have traditionally been, and remain, non-diverse work environments with many barriers to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). These barriers disproportionately affect entry of early career scientists and practitioners and limit the success of marine conservation professionals from under-represented, margina...

A growing number of studies are using accelerometers to examine activity level patterns in aquatic animals. However, given the amount of data generated from accelerometers, most of these studies use loggers that archive acceleration data, thus requiring physical recovery of the loggers or acoustic transmission from within a receiver array to obtain...

Given the conservation status and ecological, cultural, and commercial importance of chondrichthyan fishes, it is valuable to evaluate the extent to which research attention is spread across taxa and geographic locations and to assess the degree to which scientific research is appropriately addressing the challenges they face. Here we review trends...

Historical overfishing of sharks in South Florida has necessitated policy interventions to restore populations to sustainable levels. Despite increases in some shark populations attributed to these regulations, there have been growing stakeholder conflicts over conservation measures concerning seasonal catch allowances and the shark fin trade. Howe...

Quantifying successful ecological spillover from marine protected areas (MPAs) is challenging yet crucial for conservation planning. The queen conch (Lobatus gigas) supports an iconic Bahamian fishery, but populations are declining. Here we provide evidence for MPAs as a solution: showing that a well‐enforced MPA supplies ecological spillover throu...

Arguments for the need to conserve aquatic predator (AP) populations often focus on the ecological and socioeconomic roles they play. Here, we summarize the diverse ecosystem functions and services connected to APs, including regulating food webs, cycling nutrients, engineering habitats, transmitting diseases/parasites, mediating ecological invasio...

Relational values (RV) are values that arise from a relationship with nature, encompassing a sense of place, feelings of well-being (mental and physical health), and cultural, community, or personal identities. With sharks, such values are formed by diverse groups that interact with these animals and their ecosystems, either physically or virtually...

Sharks occupy unique roles in human society: objects of conservation campaigns, fishery and tourism resources, maligned predators inciting fear in beach-goers, and subjects of inquisitive scientists. There are more than 1250 species of sharks and their relatives, which have persisted on Earth in some evolutionary form for over 420 million years and...

To fuel the high energetic demands of reproduction, vertebrates employ different tactics of resource use. Large sharks exhibit long gestation periods and have relatively few well-developed young, which likely incurs high energetic costs. However, information on the relationship between the reproductive and energetic states for most shark species is...

This study presents the energy, water, and carbon (C) flux dynamics of a young afforested temperate white pine (Pinus strobus L.) forest in southern Ontario, Canada during the initial fourteen years (2003-2016) of establishment. Energy fluxes, namely, net radiation (Rn), latent heat (LE), and sensible heat (H) flux increased over time, due to canop...

Understanding potential responses of aquatic animals to climate variability is important, given the wide-ranging implications of current and future climatic change scenarios. Here, we used long-term data from natural predator?prey interactions between white sharks Carcharodon carcharias and Cape fur seals Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus in False Ba...

Understanding potential responses of aquatic animals to climate variability is important given the wide-ranging implications of current and future climatic change scenarios. Here, we used long-term data from natural predator–prey interactions between white sharks Carcharodon carcharias and Cape fur seals Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus in False Bay...

Elasmobranchs are a group of animals which have been subjected to major stressors including overfishing and habitat degradation, and now face the consequences of rising human carbon dioxide emissions – increased temperature and acidity, and decreased oxygen content in the oceans. Here, we systematically review the literature to assess characteristi...

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are designed to conserve and preserve the eco - systems and cultural resources of the ocean. In theory, protected populations flourish, replenish adjacent regions, and are self-sustaining. However, describing the efficacy of MPAs requires long-term monitoring. Queen conch Lobatus gigas are iconic Caribbean denizens wit...

It is increasingly common for scientists to engage in sharing science-related knowledge with diverse knowledge users—an activity called science communication. Given that many scientists now seek information on how to communicate effectively, we have generated a list of 16 important considerations for those interested in science communication: (1) D...

Evaluating how predators metabolize energy is increasingly useful for conservation physiology, as it can provide information on their current nutritional condition. However, obtaining metabolic information from mobile marine predators is inherently challenging owing to their relative rarity, cryptic nature and often wide-ranging underwater movement...

It is commonly assumed that elasmobranchs (sharks, skates, and rays) are most active during dark periods (dawn, dusk, night). However, this assertion has not been critically evaluated. It is also unclear whether dark periods are primarily utilized for the performance of important life-history events, such as mating. If this were the case, low-light...

Forest plantations are commonly used to restore the ecological and hydrological functionality of landscapes. In this study, we investigated the hydrologic response of a 74-year old pine plantation forest in southern Ontario, Canada to a selective thinning, wherein 30% of trees were harvested in winter of 2012. Tree-level and ecosystem-level water f...

All animals’ performance is inherently limited by temperature. Quantifying a species’ optimal thermal environment, particularly for ectothermic fish whose body temperature is dictated by that of the surrounding water, is necessary in order to project their behaviors with respect to climate change. Here, we demonstrate a novel application of estimat...

This study analyzed age-related water use dynamics across three temperate conifer forest plantations (aged 11-, 39-, and 74-years old, as of 2013, henceforth referred to as TP02, TP74, and TP39, where the last two digits represent the year of planting) in southern Ontario, Canada from 2008 to 2013. Eddy covariance-measured mean evapotranspiration o...

See: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.10549/full