Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 30, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-98).

The study of environmental history suggests that nature and culture change all the time, but that the rate and scale of such change can vary enormously. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglo settlement in the American West transformed landscapes and ecologies, creating new and complex environmental problems. This transformation was particularly impressive in Cache Valley, Utah's Bear River Range. From 1860 to 1910, Mormon settlers overused or misused the Bear River Range's lumber, grazing forage, wild game, and water resources and introduced invasive plant and animal species throughout the area. By the turn of the 20th century, broad overuse of natural resources caused rivers originating in the Bear River Range to decline. To address the water shortage, a small group of conservation-minded intellectuals and businessmen in Cache Valley persuaded local stockmen and farmers to support the creation of the Logan Forest Reserve in 1903. From 1903 to1910, forest managers and forest users attempted to restore the utility of the landscape (i.e., bring back forage and improve watershed conditions) however, they quickly discovered that the landscape had changed too much; nature would not cooperate with their human-imposed restoration timelines and desires for greater profit margins. Keeping in mind the impressive rate and scale of environmental decline, this thesis tells the heretofore untold environmental history of the Bear River Range from 1860 to 1910. It engages this history from an ecological and social perspective by (1) exploring how Mormon settlers altered the landscape ecology of the Bear River Range and (2) discussing the reasons why forest managers and forest users failed to quickly restore profitability to the mountain landscape from 1903-1910. As its value, a study of the Bear River Range offers an intimate case study of environmental decline and attempted restoration in the western United States, and is a reminder of how sensitive our mountain ranges really are.

For many native, imperiled salmonid species, the prioritization of recovery and conservation efforts hinges upon the identification of a species most limiting life stage. The early life-history stage can be a limiting life stage for fish, and given the importance of the reproductive stage to overall persistence, there is a need to better understand the spawning ecology and early life history of many salmonids. The Logan River, in northern Utah, contains one of the largest metapopulations of imperiled Bonneville cutthroat trout (BCT) throughout the Bonneville Basin. Little research has evaluated the temporal and spatial distribution of BCT spawning nor quantified their early life-history survival. In the summer of 2008, I documented the spawning ecology of BCT and quantified their early life-history survival via egg-to-fry survival field experiments in four tributaries to the Logan River. I observed considerable variability in the timing, magnitude, and duration of spawning between study streams, in part as a function of a variable, multi-peaked hydrograph. I also conducted egg-to-fry survival experiments using incubation boxes and hatchery-fertilized, eyed cutthroat embryos and installed these boxes throughout my study streams. I found that survival was extremely variable within and among my study streams. For example, the variation I observed in survival appeared to be a function of fine sediment loads. Lastly, I observed that in the Logan River the timing of greatest intensity of both stream side and in-stream anthropogenic activities (e.g., livestock grazing, horseback riding) overlaps directly with the spawning and early life stages of BCT. Using my estimates of early survival, I revised a four-stage matrix population model for BCT in order to evaluate the hypothetical effects of anthropogenic impact on rearing areas. I determined that population growth rates are sensitive to perturbation at the egg-to-fry and fry to age-1 stages, and if even a small number of redds are destroyed through habitat degradation, a high degree of immigration of reproductively mature BCT is required to maintain the near-term persistence of this population. Future conservation efforts for BCT should be prioritized to protect areas where land-use activities are high during the sensitive spawning and early life-stage periods.