Scott Loss

Scott Loss
Oklahoma State University | Oklahoma State · Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management

Ph.D.

About

129
Publications
60,680
Reads
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6,611
Citations
Introduction
Welcome to Scott Loss's lab at Oklahoma State University. We study multiple aspects of global change ecology & management. Our research is question, issue, and concept driven and applies principles of conservation biology, urban ecology, invasion biology, disease ecology, and landscape ecology. Birds are the focus of much of our work, but we also study plants, invertebrates, and wildlife broadly. We have ongoing projects addressing: human-caused wildlife mortality, including cat predation and bird collisions with buildings and energy infrastructure; impacts of invasive earthworms on soil microbes, plants, and wildlife,; the ecology of olfaction as it relates to prey habitat selection and predator foraging; the urban ecology of tick-borne diseases; the effects of climate change on birds
Additional affiliations
August 2013 - May 2020
Oklahoma State University
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
August 2011 - July 2013
Smithsonian Institution
Position
  • PostDoc Position
August 2007 - July 2011
University of Minnesota
Position
  • Graduate Research Fellow (PhD)

Publications

Publications (129)
Article
Full-text available
Non-native earthworm invasions can greatly alter plant communities directly through root consumption, or indirectly, including through effects on arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. However, most invasive earthworm research evaluating effects on plants and AM fungi has been conducted in historically earthworm-free regions. We assessed effects of non...
Article
Full-text available
Collisions with building windows are a top bird mortality source, but few studies have evaluated how bird–window collisions are influenced by weather. By monitoring collisions daily at 21 buildings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over 4 migration seasons, we show that weather influences numbers of window collisions of nocturnal migrants in spring and fa...
Article
Full-text available
Bird–window collisions (BWCs) are a major threat to avian populations, annually causing up to one billion bird deaths in the US alone and untold numbers of fatalities worldwide. Until recently, there has been limited institutional and governmental recognition of this issue and few coordinated, national‐level efforts to address it. To fill this need...
Article
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Wetland ecosystems are vital for maintaining global biodiversity, as they provide important stopover sites for many species of migrating wetland‐associated birds. However, because weather determines their hydrologic cycles, wetlands are highly vulnerable to effects of climate change. Although changes in temperature and precipitation resulting from...
Article
Full-text available
The green-upof vegetation in spring brings a pulse of food resources that many animals track during migration. However, green-up phenology is changing with climate change, posing an immense challenge for species that time their migrations to coincide with these resource pulses. We evaluated changes in green-up phenology from 2002 to 2021 in relatio...
Article
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The Great Plains region is experiencing a biome-level conversion as grasslands are being rapidly encroached by eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana L.; ERC) which, in turn, causes abiotic and biotic changes throughout the region. These changes brought about by ERC encroachment are providing habitat for ticks and mosquitoes that increase the risk...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT—Patterns of species’ distribution and abundance are dynamic in response to changes in land cover, climate, interspecific relationships, and other factors. There are many examples of latitudinal range expansions, contractions, and shifts associated with warming climate. Global change effects are also manifested along gradients of longitude,...
Article
Bird populations are declining globally. Wind and solar energy can reduce emissions of fossil fuels that drive anthropogenic climate change, yet renewable‐energy production represents a potential threat to bird species. Surveys to assess potential effects at renewable‐energy facilities are exclusively local, and the geographic extent encompassed by...
Article
Urbanization alters abiotic conditions, vegetation, and wildlife populations in ways that affect tick abundance and tick-borne disease prevalence. Likely due to such changes, tick abundance has increased in many US urban areas. Despite growing public health importance of tick-borne diseases, little is known about how ticks are influenced by urbaniz...
Article
Full-text available
Wetlands provide many ecosystem services and functions, including critical stopover habitat for numerous migratory bird species. Yet, loss and degradation of wetlands due to land use and land cover changes have greatly reduced wetland extent worldwide, leading to declines of many migratory shorebirds globally. In the Western Hemisphere, wetlands of...
Article
Trichinella species infect many groups of vertebrates throughout the world. Data for Trichinella in wildlife in Oklahoma, USA, is limited, and key reservoir hosts have yet to be identified. We performed artificial digestions on feral hogs (Sus scrofa; n=42) and wild birds (19 species; n=36) from Oklahoma to detect the presence of Trichinella larvae...
Article
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Climate change, interacting with and exacerbating anthropogenic modifications to the landscape, is altering ecosystem structure and function, biodiversity, and species distributions. Among the most visible short-term impacts are the altered ecological roles of foundation species—those species, native or non-native—that create locally stable environ...
Research
Citizen science use in gathering data on bird-window collisions in multiple countries to help in global conservation.
Article
Full-text available
Unlabelled: Bird-window collisions are a major source of human-caused mortality for which there are multiple mitigation and prevention options available. Despite growing availability of products designed to reduce collisions (e.g., glass with etched patterns or markers and films adhered over existing glass), few replicated field tests have been co...
Article
Full-text available
Little guidance is available to assist wetland managers in developing climate adaptation plans. To facilitate development of recommendations for adaptation strategies, it is essential to first determine if or how wetland managers are addressing these challenges. We used an online survey to solicit feedback from wetland managers and biologists in th...
Article
Wind power is an expanding source of renewable energy. However, there are ecological challenges related to wind energy generation, including collisions of wildlife with turbines. Lack of rigor, and variation in study design, together limit efforts to understand the broad-scale effects of wind power infrastructure on wildlife populations. It is not...
Article
Full-text available
Free-roaming domestic cats (i.e., cats that are owned or unowned and are considered ‘at large’) are globally distributed non-native species that have marked impacts on biodiversity and human health. Despite clear scientific evidence of these impacts, free-roaming cats are either unmanaged or managed using scientifically unsupported and ineffective...
Article
Woody plant encroachment into grasslands is occurring worldwide, affecting ecosystems in ways that likely influence mosquito-borne disease transmission. In the U.S. Great Plains, encroachment by eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) (ERC) may be expanding conducive habitat for mosquitoes and their hosts, but few studies have evaluated association...
Article
Full-text available
Wetlands provide many important ecosystem functions and services worldwide and are hotspots of biological diversity. However, depressional wetlands are particularly vulnerable to effects of climate change due to the significant role that precipitation and surface runoff play in shaping their hydrology. In the Southern Great Plains of North America,...
Article
Full-text available
A vast global literature documents that free‐roaming domestic cats (Felis catus) have substantial negative effects on wildlife, including through predation, fear, disease and competition‐related impacts that have contributed to numerous wildlife extinctions and population declines worldwide. However, no study has synthesized this literature on cat...
Article
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As wind energy rapidly expands worldwide, information to minimize impacts of this development on biodiversity is urgently needed. Here we demonstrate how data collected by weather radar networks can inform placement and operation of wind facilities to reduce collisions and minimize habitat‐related impacts on nocturnally migrating birds. We found ov...
Article
In the south-central United States, several tick-borne diseases (TbDs) occur at or near their highest levels of incidence of anywhere in the U.S. The diversity of Rickettsia species found in Amblyomma americanum continues to be under-characterized in this region and throughout the U.S. and Canada where this tick species is expanding. One reason for...
Article
Full-text available
Renewable energy production can kill individual birds, but little is known about how it affects avian populations. We assessed the vulnerability of populations for 23 priority bird species killed at wind and solar facilities in California, USA. Bayesian hierarchical models suggested that 48% of these species were vulnerable to population-level effe...
Article
Full-text available
Bird-window collisions are a major source of human-caused avian mortality for which many mitigation and prevention options are available. However, because very little research has characterized human perspectives related to this issue, there is limited understanding about the most effective ways to engage the public in collision reduction efforts....
Article
Urbanization alters components of natural ecosystems which can affect tick abundance and tick-borne disease prevalence. Likely due to these changes, tick-borne pathogen prevalence has increased in many U.S. urban areas. Despite the growing public health importance of tick-borne diseases, little is known about how they are influenced by urbanization...
Article
Full-text available
As effects of climate change intensify, there is a growing need to understand thermal properties of landscapes and their influence on wildlife. A key thermal property of landscapes is vegetation structure and composition. Management approaches can alter vegetation and consequently the thermal landscape, potentially resulting in underappreciated con...
Article
Nest site selection is crucial for survival and fecundity of birds. Predators find nests using visual, aural, thermal, and olfactory cues, yet few studies have evaluated olfactory concealment of nests. Rat snakes (Pantherophis spp.) are common nest predators that use ground-level olfactory cues to detect nest locations. In Arkansas, USA, we evaluat...
Article
Full-text available
Vector‐borne diseases (VBDs) impact human and animal health globally, and their ecology and transmission are affected by human‐caused ecosystem and biome transitions. Woody plant encroachment (WPE), a top driver of biome and land cover transitions in grasslands and savannas of the world, greatly changes abiotic conditions, vegetation and animal pop...
Article
Full-text available
Migratory birds play an important role in large-scale movements of ticks and tick-borne pathogens, yet little is known about tick infestation of resident birds (e.g., non-migratory species and migratory species during the breeding season), especially in urban ecosystems. We captured birds during the breeding season in parks and greenspaces in Oklah...
Article
Full-text available
A central challenge in applied ecology is understanding the effect of anthropogenic fatalities on wildlife populations and predicting which populations may be particularly vulnerable and in greatest need of management attention. We used three approaches to investigate the potential effects of fatalities from collisions with wind turbines on 14 rapt...
Article
Full-text available
Expansion of urbanization and infrastructure associated with human activities has numerous impacts on wildlife including causing wildlife-structure collisions. Collisions with building windows represent a top bird mortality source, but a lack of research into timing of these collisions hampers efforts to predict them and mitigate effects on avian p...
Article
Full-text available
Human‐caused noise pollution dominates the soundscape of modern ecosystems, from urban centres to national parks. Although wildlife can generally alter their communication to accommodate many types of natural noise (e.g. wind, wave action, heterospecific communication), noise pollution from anthropogenic sources pushes the limits of wildlife commun...
Article
Climate change, including directional shifts in weather averages and extremes and increased interannual weather variation, is influencing demography and distributions for many bird species. The Ouachita Mountains ecoregion in southeast Oklahoma and west-central Arkansas contains 2 populations of the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Dryobates borealis, RCW)...
Article
Full-text available
Up to 1 billion birds die annually in the U.S. from window collisions; most of these casualties represent migratory native species. Because this major mortality source likely contributes to the decline of the North American avifauna, mitigation tools are needed that accurately predict real‐time collision risk, allowing hazards to be minimized befor...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing free-ranging cat populations are a cause of concern for wildlife management and biodiversity conservation. Cats carry and transmit multiple diseases, annually depredate billions of birds and mammals in the mainland United States, and have caused extinctions and declines of wildlife populations worldwide. Trap–neuter–return (TNR) efforts,...
Article
Throughout much of the world, growing populations of free-ranging domestic cats pose an increasingly serious threat to biodiversity. However, no study has estimated the magnitude of wildlife mortality caused by cats in China, one of the largest and most biodiverse nations on earth. We used a novel, survey questionnaire-based approach to estimate an...
Article
Full-text available
Collisions with buildings cause up to 1 billion bird fatalities annually in the United States and Canada. However, efforts to reduce collisions would benefit from studies conducted at large spatial scales across multiple study sites with standardized methods and consideration of species‐ and life‐history‐related variation and correlates of collisio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Collisions with buildings are a major source of mortality for wild birds, but these instantaneous events are difficult to observe. As a result, the mechanistic causes of collision mortality are poorly understood. Here, we evaluate whether sensory and biomechanical traits can explain why some species are more collision-prone than others. We first ex...
Article
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Increasing global energy demand is fostering the development of renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. However, renewable energy facilities may adversely affect wildlife. Facility siting guidelines recommend or require project developers complete pre‐ and postconstruction wildlife surveys to predict risk and estimate effects of propose...
Article
Urbanization increasingly exposes birds to multiple sources of direct anthropogenic mortality. Collisions with buildings, and windows in particular, are a top bird mortality source, annually causing 365–988 million fatalities in the United States. Correlates of window collision rates have been studied at the scale of entire buildings and in relatio...
Article
Full-text available
Human activity influences wildlife. However, the ecological and conservation significances of these influences are difficult to predict and depend on their population-level consequences. This difficulty arises partly because of information gaps, and partly because the data on stressors are usually collected in a count-based manner (e.g., number of...
Article
Full-text available
Weather appears to influence collisions of migratory birds with human-built structures including buildings, but formal analyses are lacking. In 2018, as part of a two-year study at 21 buildings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, we observed a large number of American woodcock Scolopax minor collisions during two early spring snowstorms. We describe th...
Article
Full-text available
We determined prevalence of Rickettsia spp. in 172 ticks of the Amblyomma maculatum group collected from 16 urban sites in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, during 2017 and 2018. Most ticks (59.3%) were collected from 1 site; 4 (2.3%) were infected with Rickettsia parkeri and 118 (68.6%) with Candidatus Rickettsia andeanae.
Article
Collisions with buildings annually kill up to 1 billion birds in the United States. Bird-building collisions primarily occur at glass surfaces: birds often fail to perceive glass as a barrier and appear to be attracted to artificial light emitted from windows. However, some aspects of avian vision are poorly understood, including how bird responses...
Article
Full-text available
Wild birds play important roles in the maintenance and dispersal of tick populations and tick-borne pathogens, yet in field studies of tick-borne disease ecology and epidemiology there is limited standardization of how birds are searched for ticks. We conducted a qualitative literature review of 100 field studies where birds were searched for ticks...
Article
Full-text available
Bird-building collisions are the largest source of avian collision mortality in North America. Despite a growing literature on bird-building collisions, little research has been conducted in downtown areas of major cities, and no studies have included stadiums, which can be extremely large, often have extensive glass surfaces and lighting, and ther...
Article
Full-text available
Soil organisms, including earthworms, are a key component of terrestrial ecosystems. However, little is known about their diversity, their distribution, and the threats affecting them. We compiled a global dataset of sampled earthworm communities from 6928 sites in 57 countries as a basis for predicting patterns in earthworm diversity, abundance, a...
Data
This PDF file includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Figs. S1 to S6 Tables S1 to S4 References
Data
This PDF file includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Figs. S1 to S6 Tables S1 to S4 References
Data
This PDF file includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Figs. S1 to S6 Tables S1 to S4 References
Data
This PDF file includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Figs. S1 to S6 Tables S1 to S4 References
Data
This PDF file includes: Materials and Methods Supplementary Text Figs. S1 to S6 Tables S1 to S4 References
Article
Full-text available
Robust, quantitative comparisons of environmental effects across energy sources can support development of energy planning strategies that meet growing demand while managing and minimizing undesirable effects on environmental resources. Multicriteria analyses of energy systems often use a suite of indicators to make such comparisons, but those indi...
Article
Full-text available
Electricity from wind energy is a major contributor to the strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use and thus reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Wind energy, like all power sources, can have adverse impacts on wildlife. After nearly 25 years of focused research, these impacts are much better understood, although u...
Article
Full-text available
Non‐native, invasive earthworms are altering soils throughout the world. Ecological cascades emanating from these invasions stem from rapid consumption of leaf litter by earthworms. This occurs at a midpoint in the trophic pyramid, unlike the more familiar bottom‐up or top‐down cascades. These cascades cause fundamental changes (“microcascade effec...
Article
Full-text available
Global climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of weather extremes, including severe droughts in many regions. Drought can impact organisms by inhibiting reproduction, reducing survival and abundance, and forcing range shifts. For birds, considering temporal scale by averaging drought‐related variables over different time lengths (...
Article
Comparing environmental impacts of different energy sources can inform energy investments and environmental conservation. Direct wildlife mortality from energy development receives substantial public and scientific attention, but it is unclear whether rigorous comparisons of mortality among energy sources are possible. To address this question, we...
Article
Full-text available
Predator–prey interactions influence behaviors and life-history evolution for both predator and prey species and also have implications for biodiversity conservation. A fundamental goal of ecology is to clarify mechanisms underlying predator–prey interactions and dynamics. To investigate the role of predator sensory mechanisms in predator–prey inte...
Article
Full-text available
Misinformation (or denialism), the disingenuous assertion of information contradicting overwhelming scientific consensus, increasingly poses a challenge for invasion biology. The issue of free-ranging domestic cats (Felis catus) provides an example of this misinformation: overwhelming consensus shows that cats are invasive species that impact wildl...
Article
Wildlife collisions with human-built structures are a major source of direct anthropogenic mortality. Understanding and mitigating the impact of anthropogenic collisions on wildlife populations require unbiased mortality estimates. However, counts of collision fatalities are underestimated due to several bias sources, including scavenger removal of...
Chapter
A large and growing variety of anthropogenic (i.e., human-related) activities threaten birds from the most common to the most critically endangered. Unlike natural threats, such as depredation by native predators and death from storms, the vast majority of anthropogenic mortality factors for birds are recent, emerging since the nineteenth century o...
Article
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Article impact statement: Misinformation campaigns create false doubt about free‐ranging cat impacts, hinder efforts to manage cat numbers and conserve biodiversity.
Article
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Many terrestrial predators rely on olfaction to detect prey; therefore, prey should select habitat to reduce detectability of their odor cues. One way prey can potentially conceal their odor is by selecting locations with high turbulence and/or updrafts, conditions that disperse odor plumes and make odor sources difficult to locate. However, it is...
Article
Domestic cats (Felis catus) have contributed to at least 63 vertebrate extinctions, pose a major hazard to threatened vertebrates worldwide, and transmit multiple zoonotic diseases. On continents and large islands (collectively termed “mainlands”), cats are responsible for very high mortality of vertebrates. Nevertheless, cat population management...