Donald R Zak
Biographic Data
| ID | 9035064 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Donald R Zak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Donald R |
| FAMILY NAME | Zak |
| SIGNATURE | ZAK D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | School of Natural Resources & Environment University of Michigan Ann Arbor Michigan United States |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 0 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 21 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Urban Ecological Infrastructure
It is likely that half of the urban areas that will exist in 2050 have not yet been designed and built. This provides tremendous opportunities for enhancing urban sustainability, and using “nature in cities” is critical to more resilient solutions to urban challenges. Terms for “urban nature” include Green Infrastructure (GI), Green-Blue Infrastructure (GBI), Urban Green Space (UGS), and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). These terms, and the concepts…
Evaluating the effects of land-use change and future climate change on vulnerability of coastal landscapes to saltwater intrusion
The exposure of freshwater-dependent coastal ecosystems to saltwater is a present-day impact of climate and land-use changes in many coastal regions, with the potential to harm freshwater and terrestrial biota, alter biogeochemical cycles and reduce agricultural yields. Land-use activities associated with artificial drainage infrastructure (canals, ditches, and drains) could exacerbate saltwater exposure. However, studies assessing the effects of…
Fate and consequence of nutrients at an abandoned feedlot, Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, Minnesota, USA
Old, abandoned feedlots may serve as a source of nutrients that can degrade groundwater and downstream water quality. We characterized the distribution and concentration of nutrients at the Crookston Cattle Company feedlot (northwest Minnesota, USA), 15 years after it ended operations in 1999. Groundwater nitrate concentration decreased from 55 mg/L (as nitrogen) in 2003 to less than 5 mg/L since 2007. Results from stable isotope analysis, with δ…
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are ecological disrupting compounds (EcoDC)
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are ubiquitous in freshwater ecosystems worldwide and are recognized as contaminants of concern. Currently, contaminants of concern are classified for their persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity (PBT criteria). PPCPs are not classified as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), although some PPCPs share characteristics similar to POPs. For example, PPCPs are known to be pseudopersistent due to…
Fertilizer legacies meet saltwater incursion
Coastal wetland restoration is an important tool for climate change adaptation and excess nutrient runoff mitigation. However, the capacity of restored coastal wetlands to provide multiple ecosystem services is limited by stressors, such as excess nutrients from upstream agricultural fields, high nutrient legacies on-site, and rising salinities downstream. The effects of these stressors are exacerbated by an accelerating hydrologic cycle, expecte…
Meeting the challenge of interacting threats in freshwater ecosystems
Human activities create threats that have consequences for freshwater ecosystems and, in most watersheds, observed ecological responses are the result of complex interactions among multiple threats and their associated ecological alterations. Here we discuss the value of considering multiple threats in research and management, offer suggestions for filling knowledge gaps, and provide guidance for addressing the urgent management challenges posed …
Anthropogenic impacts on an oyster metapopulation
Humans rely on marine ecosystems for a variety of services but often impact these ecosystems directly or indirectly limiting their capacity to provide such services. One growing impact is the emergence of marine disease. We present results from a unique case study examining how oysters, a dominant organism in many coastal bays and estuaries that is often harvested for food, have responded to pathogens influenced by human activities, namely the in…
Comment on “Suburban watershed nitrogen retention
I reassess a recent analysis of uncertainty in estimates of nitrogen export from stormwater control measures, using structured expert judgment, which concluded that nitrogen export from a watershed in the Piedmont physiographic province of the Chesapeake Bay basin was an order of magnitude greater than from a watershed in the adjacent the Coastal Plain province. Re-analysis of expert responses suggests that hydrographic measurement error is a lik…
Type and timing of stream flow changes in urbanizing watersheds in the Eastern U.S
Linking the type and timing of hydrologic changes with patterns of urban growth is essential to identifying the underlying mechanisms that drive declines in urban aquatic ecosystems. In six urbanizing watersheds surrounding three U.S. cities (Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, and Pittsburgh, PA), we reconstructed the history of development patterns since 1900 and assessed the magnitude and timing of stream flow changes during watershed development. Deve…
Urban microbial ecology of a freshwater estuary of Lake Michigan
Freshwater estuaries throughout the Great Lakes region receive stormwater runoff and riverine inputs from heavily urbanized population centers. While human and animal feces contained in this runoff are often the focus of source tracking investigations, non-fecal bacterial loads from soil, aerosols, urban infrastructure, and other sources are also transported to estuaries and lakes. We quantified and characterized this non-fecal urban microbial co…
Bacteria and fungi associated with isoprene consumption in soil
Isoprene is a reactive volatile organic compound released from the biosphere that can be abundant in the planetary boundary layer, where it can have a myriad of effects on atmospheric chemistry and secondary aerosol formation. There is currently a high degree of uncertainty in forecasts of how atmospheric isoprene concentrations will shift in response to anthropogenic land-use change and climate change. One source of this uncertainty is that stud…
Reply to comment on “Suburban watershed nitrogen retention
We reply to a comment on our recent structured expert judgment analysis of stormwater nitrogen retention in suburban watersheds. Low relief, permeable soils, a dynamic stream channel, and subsurface flows characterize many lowland Coastal Plain watersheds. These features result in unique catchment hydrology, limit the precision of streamflow measurements, and challenge the assumptions for calculating runoff from rainfall and catchment area. We re…
The potential of novel native plant materials for the restoration of novel ecosystems
Extensive ecological change has been sustained by many dryland ecosystems throughout the world, resulting in conversion to so-called novel ecosystems. It is within such ecological contexts that native plant materials destined for ecological applications must be able to function. In the Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt. ssp. wyomingensis [Beetle & A.M. Young] S.L. Welsh) ecosystems of the Intermountain West, for example, novel ecos…
Warming, soil moisture, and loss of snow increase Bromus tectorum ’s population growth rate
Climate change threatens to exacerbate the impacts of invasive species. In temperate ecosystems, direct effects of warming may be compounded by dramatic reductions in winter snow cover. Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is arguably the most destructive biological invader in basins of the North American Intermountain West, and warming could increase its performance through direct effects on demographic rates or through indirect effects mediated by loss…
Response of stream ecosystem function and structure to sediment metal
Physicochemical and ecological attributes of ecosystems (i.e., environmental context) can modify the exposure and effects of metals, which presents a challenge for ecosystem management. Furthermore, the functional and structural attributes of an ecosystem may not respond equally to metals or be uniformly responsive to environmental context. We explored how physicochemical and ecological context modified sediment metal dose-response for a suite of…
Biotic impoverishment
Becoming Europe
When I visited the Southeast Asian tropics as an undergraduate in 1973 it seemed as different from my European home as anywhere on Earth could be. The forest was already in retreat, but large contiguous tracts remained virtually intact. Fast-forward 40 years, however, and more than half of the original forest cover of Southeast Asia has gone, more than half of what remains has been logged or otherwise degraded, and the majority, logged or unlogge…
Towards a general theory of biodiversity for the Anthropocene
Imagine a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you are traveling through space and come across Earth for the first time what would you be most struck by? Would it be the water that gives our planet the nickname 'blue-marble'? I doubt it. We've now found water on the moon Would you instead be struck by the mountains, canyons and other geological features that are most visible from space? Again, it's doubtful. Geologists tell us there are few, if any, la…
Biological invasions
One of the greatest ongoing ecological changes of the Anthropocene is the rearrangement of the earth’s biogeography, as people deliberately or inadvertently move species around. We have been doing this for a long time – the Lapita people from southeast Asia brought various plants and animals (including the Pacific rat) to many islands in the Pacific beginning about 3,000 years ago. However, the number of species introduced to new regions has mass…
Pacific islands in the Anthropocene
Although the islands of remote Oceania were among the last places reached by humanity, many islands entered the Anthropocene early. Extinctions -some caused by the first people to discover islands -have been far more frequent on islands than continents, and the intensity and consequences of human-caused biological invasion, deforestation, and landscape alteration have been substantially greater as well At the same time, islands provide a useful m…
Proactive ecology for the Anthropocene
The rapid, directional global changes that characterize the Anthropocene provide unprecedented opportunities for ecologists and other scientists to discover new paradigms that shape our understanding of the ways that the world is changing. These paradigms will likely focus more strongly on interactions, feedbacks, thresholds, and model uncertainty than on steady-state dynamics and statistical uncertainty. We advocate a shift in ecology and other …
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Biotic impoverishment
Becoming Europe
When I visited the Southeast Asian tropics as an undergraduate in 1973 it seemed as different from my European home as anywhere on Earth could be. The forest was already in retreat, but large contiguous tracts remained virtually intact. Fast-forward 40 years, however, and more than half of the original forest cover of Southeast Asia has gone, more than half of what remains has been logged or otherwise degraded, and the majority, logged or unlogge…
Towards a general theory of biodiversity for the Anthropocene
Imagine a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you are traveling through space and come across Earth for the first time what would you be most struck by? Would it be the water that gives our planet the nickname 'blue-marble'? I doubt it. We've now found water on the moon Would you instead be struck by the mountains, canyons and other geological features that are most visible from space? Again, it's doubtful. Geologists tell us there are few, if any, la…
Biological invasions
One of the greatest ongoing ecological changes of the Anthropocene is the rearrangement of the earth’s biogeography, as people deliberately or inadvertently move species around. We have been doing this for a long time – the Lapita people from southeast Asia brought various plants and animals (including the Pacific rat) to many islands in the Pacific beginning about 3,000 years ago. However, the number of species introduced to new regions has mass…
Pacific islands in the Anthropocene
Although the islands of remote Oceania were among the last places reached by humanity, many islands entered the Anthropocene early. Extinctions -some caused by the first people to discover islands -have been far more frequent on islands than continents, and the intensity and consequences of human-caused biological invasion, deforestation, and landscape alteration have been substantially greater as well At the same time, islands provide a useful m…
Proactive ecology for the Anthropocene
The rapid, directional global changes that characterize the Anthropocene provide unprecedented opportunities for ecologists and other scientists to discover new paradigms that shape our understanding of the ways that the world is changing. These paradigms will likely focus more strongly on interactions, feedbacks, thresholds, and model uncertainty than on steady-state dynamics and statistical uncertainty. We advocate a shift in ecology and other …
Warming, soil moisture, and loss of snow increase Bromus tectorum ’s population growth rate
Climate change threatens to exacerbate the impacts of invasive species. In temperate ecosystems, direct effects of warming may be compounded by dramatic reductions in winter snow cover. Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is arguably the most destructive biological invader in basins of the North American Intermountain West, and warming could increase its performance through direct effects on demographic rates or through indirect effects mediated by loss…
Response of stream ecosystem function and structure to sediment metal
Physicochemical and ecological attributes of ecosystems (i.e., environmental context) can modify the exposure and effects of metals, which presents a challenge for ecosystem management. Furthermore, the functional and structural attributes of an ecosystem may not respond equally to metals or be uniformly responsive to environmental context. We explored how physicochemical and ecological context modified sediment metal dose-response for a suite of…
Comment on “Suburban watershed nitrogen retention
I reassess a recent analysis of uncertainty in estimates of nitrogen export from stormwater control measures, using structured expert judgment, which concluded that nitrogen export from a watershed in the Piedmont physiographic province of the Chesapeake Bay basin was an order of magnitude greater than from a watershed in the adjacent the Coastal Plain province. Re-analysis of expert responses suggests that hydrographic measurement error is a lik…
Type and timing of stream flow changes in urbanizing watersheds in the Eastern U.S
Linking the type and timing of hydrologic changes with patterns of urban growth is essential to identifying the underlying mechanisms that drive declines in urban aquatic ecosystems. In six urbanizing watersheds surrounding three U.S. cities (Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, and Pittsburgh, PA), we reconstructed the history of development patterns since 1900 and assessed the magnitude and timing of stream flow changes during watershed development. Deve…
Urban microbial ecology of a freshwater estuary of Lake Michigan
Freshwater estuaries throughout the Great Lakes region receive stormwater runoff and riverine inputs from heavily urbanized population centers. While human and animal feces contained in this runoff are often the focus of source tracking investigations, non-fecal bacterial loads from soil, aerosols, urban infrastructure, and other sources are also transported to estuaries and lakes. We quantified and characterized this non-fecal urban microbial co…
Bacteria and fungi associated with isoprene consumption in soil
Isoprene is a reactive volatile organic compound released from the biosphere that can be abundant in the planetary boundary layer, where it can have a myriad of effects on atmospheric chemistry and secondary aerosol formation. There is currently a high degree of uncertainty in forecasts of how atmospheric isoprene concentrations will shift in response to anthropogenic land-use change and climate change. One source of this uncertainty is that stud…
Reply to comment on “Suburban watershed nitrogen retention
We reply to a comment on our recent structured expert judgment analysis of stormwater nitrogen retention in suburban watersheds. Low relief, permeable soils, a dynamic stream channel, and subsurface flows characterize many lowland Coastal Plain watersheds. These features result in unique catchment hydrology, limit the precision of streamflow measurements, and challenge the assumptions for calculating runoff from rainfall and catchment area. We re…
The potential of novel native plant materials for the restoration of novel ecosystems
Extensive ecological change has been sustained by many dryland ecosystems throughout the world, resulting in conversion to so-called novel ecosystems. It is within such ecological contexts that native plant materials destined for ecological applications must be able to function. In the Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt. ssp. wyomingensis [Beetle & A.M. Young] S.L. Welsh) ecosystems of the Intermountain West, for example, novel ecos…
Anthropogenic impacts on an oyster metapopulation
Humans rely on marine ecosystems for a variety of services but often impact these ecosystems directly or indirectly limiting their capacity to provide such services. One growing impact is the emergence of marine disease. We present results from a unique case study examining how oysters, a dominant organism in many coastal bays and estuaries that is often harvested for food, have responded to pathogens influenced by human activities, namely the in…
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are ecological disrupting compounds (EcoDC)
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are ubiquitous in freshwater ecosystems worldwide and are recognized as contaminants of concern. Currently, contaminants of concern are classified for their persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity (PBT criteria). PPCPs are not classified as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), although some PPCPs share characteristics similar to POPs. For example, PPCPs are known to be pseudopersistent due to…
Fertilizer legacies meet saltwater incursion
Coastal wetland restoration is an important tool for climate change adaptation and excess nutrient runoff mitigation. However, the capacity of restored coastal wetlands to provide multiple ecosystem services is limited by stressors, such as excess nutrients from upstream agricultural fields, high nutrient legacies on-site, and rising salinities downstream. The effects of these stressors are exacerbated by an accelerating hydrologic cycle, expecte…
Meeting the challenge of interacting threats in freshwater ecosystems
Human activities create threats that have consequences for freshwater ecosystems and, in most watersheds, observed ecological responses are the result of complex interactions among multiple threats and their associated ecological alterations. Here we discuss the value of considering multiple threats in research and management, offer suggestions for filling knowledge gaps, and provide guidance for addressing the urgent management challenges posed …
Evaluating the effects of land-use change and future climate change on vulnerability of coastal landscapes to saltwater intrusion
The exposure of freshwater-dependent coastal ecosystems to saltwater is a present-day impact of climate and land-use changes in many coastal regions, with the potential to harm freshwater and terrestrial biota, alter biogeochemical cycles and reduce agricultural yields. Land-use activities associated with artificial drainage infrastructure (canals, ditches, and drains) could exacerbate saltwater exposure. However, studies assessing the effects of…
Fate and consequence of nutrients at an abandoned feedlot, Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, Minnesota, USA
Old, abandoned feedlots may serve as a source of nutrients that can degrade groundwater and downstream water quality. We characterized the distribution and concentration of nutrients at the Crookston Cattle Company feedlot (northwest Minnesota, USA), 15 years after it ended operations in 1999. Groundwater nitrate concentration decreased from 55 mg/L (as nitrogen) in 2003 to less than 5 mg/L since 2007. Results from stable isotope analysis, with δ…
Urban Ecological Infrastructure
It is likely that half of the urban areas that will exist in 2050 have not yet been designed and built. This provides tremendous opportunities for enhancing urban sustainability, and using “nature in cities” is critical to more resilient solutions to urban challenges. Terms for “urban nature” include Green Infrastructure (GI), Green-Blue Infrastructure (GBI), Urban Green Space (UGS), and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). These terms, and the concepts…
Ecology (17 works) · Biology (14 works) · Environmental Science (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Ecosystem (8 works) · Geology (8 works) · Population (5 works) · Anthropocene (4 works) · Chemistry (4 works) · Environmental Chemistry (4 works)