Kristin Marie Brunk

• Brunk, Kristin Marie; Goldberg, Joshua; Maxwell, Charles; Peery, M Zachariah; Jones, Gavin M & Gallagher, Lief R [Vis alle 11 forfattere av denne artikkelen] (2025). Bioregional-scale acoustic monitoring can support fire-prone forest restoration planning. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. ISSN 1540-9295. doi: 10.1002/fee.2843. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Erickson-Harris, Garrett; Wood, Connor M. & Brunk, Kristin Marie (2025). A Simple, Quantitative Determination of the Appropriate Duration of Site Closure to Improve Occupancy Modelling for Nomadic Species. Diversity and Distributions: A Journal of Conservation Biogeography. ISSN 1366-9516. 31(3). doi: 10.1111/ddi.70011. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Aim Occupancy models are ubiquitous in ecological and biogeographical applications, but they rely upon an assumption of site closure that is sometimes applied across many weeks or even months. Nomadic species challenge this approach because they are likely to exhibit within-season movements that violate the assumption of closure. Assuming closure for nomadic species across a full season likely results in depressed estimates of detection probability and inflated estimates of occupancy that can obscure important habitat associations. However, selecting an appropriate duration over which to assume site closure can also be a challenge, especially with continuous survey methods, like acoustic surveys or camera traps, where ‘surveys’ and ‘seasons’ can be ambiguous. Innovation We present a simple framework for quantitatively assessing the most appropriate duration over which to assume site closure by directly comparing models with differing season lengths. We demonstrate our framework using simulated data, as well as a passive acoustic monitoring dataset of a nomadic bird, the Clark's nutcracker, collected during one summer across over 25,000 km2 of the Sierra Nevada, California. We applied dynamic occupancy models to data collected during a single calendar season to optimise the occupancy approach for the nutcracker. Main Conclusions We used our method to select an appropriate duration over which to assume site closure for the Clark's nutcracker, and our simulations indicated that this method is robust under a variety of scenarios. Our empirical and simulated results suggest that quantitatively determining the duration of the closure assumption can enable a more accurate understanding of the population dynamics and habitat use of nomadic species, especially when surveys are conducted with emerging continuous, or near-continuous monitoring technologies. Our relatively simple framework can be used to improve occupancy modelling for other nomadic species, which will ultimately improve the efficacy of conservation measures taken to protect these species.

• Brunk, Kristin Marie; Kramer, H. Anu; Peery, M. Zachariah; Kahl, Stefan & Wood, Connor M. (2025). Assessing spatial variability and efficacy of surrogate species at an ecosystem scale. Conservation Biology. ISSN 0888-8892. 39(5). doi: 10.1111/cobi.70058. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Preserving biodiversity is a central goal of conservation, but, in practice, monitoring biodiversity often involves assessing population trends for one or a handful of species that are presumed proxies for biodiversity. Despite the popularity of surrogate species strategies, the links between biodiversity and surrogate species are rarely tested, especially across the broad spatial scales at which they are applied. We quantitatively evaluated a prominent surrogate species strategy across 25,000 km2 of California's Sierra Nevada, an ecosystem undergoing substantial forest loss due to changing fire regimes and climate. We used passive acoustic monitoring and multispecies occupancy models to quantify pairwise co-occurrence among 6 indicator species and much of the avian community (63 species). We found that 95% of the sampled avian community had a positive association with at least one indicator species and that latitude played an important role in shaping co-occurrence for many species. Our work provides an important test of a long-standing conservation tool, suggests that a well-chosen suite of surrogate species can represent the occurrence patterns of a large portion of the rest of the community, and demonstrates the importance of explicitly considering the spatial scale over which surrogate species are effective.

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