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\"Sheriff's detective Katrina Hurricane Williams confronts deep-rooted hate and greed in the Missouri Ozarks in this ... police procedural. What at first appears to be a brush fire in some undeveloped bottom land yields the charred remains of a young African-American man. As sheriff's detective Katrina Williams conducts her inspection of the crime scene, she discovers broken headstones and disturbed open graves in a forgotten cemetery. As Katrina attempts to sort out a complex backwoods criminal network involving the Aryan Brotherhood, meth dealers, and the Ozarks Nightriders motorcycle gang, she is confronted by the sudden appearance of a person out of her own past who may be involved. And what seems like a clear-cut case of racially motivated murder is further complicated by rumors of hidden silver and dark family histories. To uncover the ugly truth, Katrina will need to dig up past crimes and shameful secrets that certain people would kill to keep buried\"-- Provided by publisher.

Aquatic vegetation was surveyed at Mammoth Spring, AR, representing the first extensive survey of this resource since 1859. Thirty-eight angiosperm species were identified during this study, including 17 species of monocots and 21 species of eudicots. Seven species were nonnative, but they are not considered invasive. Eleven of the species reported from the spring in 1859 are still present, but some previously reported taxa were not found and other taxa are reported for the first time. Species no longer found at the spring may be due to misidentifications in the earlier study or extirpations due to climate change, anthropogenic disturbances, or unknown factors. The diversity of aquatic plants in Mammoth Spring is similar to that reported from other regional large springs and a few species are shared in common among these springs.

In the twenty-first century, the word vigilante usually conjures up images of cinematic heroes like Batman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, or Clint Eastwood in just about any film he's ever been in. But in the nineteenth century, vigilantes roamed the country long before they ever made their way onto the silver screen. In Faces Like Devils, Matthew J. Hernando closely examines one of the most famous of these vigilante groups—the Bald Knobbers. Hernando sifts through the folklore and myth surrounding the Bald Knobbers to produce an authentic history of the rise and fall of Missouri's most famous vigilantes. He details the differences between the modernizing Bald Knobbers of Taney County and the anti-progressive Bald Knobbers of Christian County, while also stressing the importance of Civil War-era violence with respect to the foundation of these vigilante groups. Despite being one of America's largest and most famous vigilante groups during the nineteenth century, the Bald Knobbers have not previously been examined in depth. Hernando's exhaustive research, which includes a plethora of state and federal court records, newspaper articles, and firsthand accounts, remedies that lack. This account of the Bald Knobbers is vital to anyone not wanting to miss out on a major part of Missouri's history.

The job of regional literature is twofold: to explore and confront the culture from within, and to help define that culture for outsiders. Taken together, the two centuries of Ozarks literature collected in this ambitious anthology do just that. The fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama presented in The Literature of the Ozarks complicate assumptions about backwoods ignorance, debunk the pastoral myth, expand on the meaning of wilderness, and position the Ozarks as a crossroads of human experience with meaningful ties to national literary movements. Among the authors presented here are an Osage priest, an early explorer from New York, a native-born farm wife, African American writers who protested attacks on their communities, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and an art history professor who created a fictional town and a postmodern parody of the region's stereotypes. The Literature of the Ozarks establishes a canon as nuanced and varied as the region's writers themselves.

Understanding how biotic communities respond to landscape spatial structure is critically important for conservation management as natural habitats become increasingly fragmented. However, empirical studies of the effects of spatial structure on plant species richness have found inconsistent results, suggesting that more comprehensive approaches are needed. We asked how landscape structure affects total plant species richness and the richness of a guild of specialized plants in a multivariate context. We sampled herbaceous plant communities at 56 dolomite glades (insular, fire-adapted grasslands) across the Missouri Ozarks, USA, and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the relative importance of landscape structure, soil resource availability, and fire history for plant communities. We found that landscape spatial structure, defined as the area-weighted proximity of glade habitat surrounding study sites (proximity index), had a significant effect on total plant species richness, but only after we controlled for environmental covariates. Richness of specialist species, but not generalists, was positively related to landscape spatial structure. Our results highlight that local environmental filters must be considered to understand the influence of landscape structure on communities and that unique species guilds may respond differently to landscape structure than the community as a whole. These findings suggest that both local environment and landscape context should be considered when developing management strategies for species of conservation concern in fragmented habitats.

Previous theoretical models and empirical studies suggested that communities can exist in a “stochastic” or “loose” equilibrium, diverging transiently but eventually returning toward earlier or average structure, in what we call here the “loose equilibrium concept” (LEC). We sampled the fish communities at 12 local stream reaches spaced broadly throughout a relatively undisturbed watershed in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, USA, in 11 surveys from 1972 to 2012 at a scale of decades, and at a subset of five of these local sites in a total of 16 surveys, allowing tests of the LEC at different spatial and temporal scales. Multivariate analyses of the dynamics of communities over the 40‐year period provided support for the LEC at both “global” and “local” scales within the watershed. At the broadest spatial scale, core species numerically dominated the community, and most common species remained so across all decades. In spite of two extraordinary floods, and interannual variation in abundance of some species, the 12‐site and five‐site global communities and eight of 12 local communities repeatedly returned toward average positions in multivariate space. Trajectories of the global and local fish communities varied relative to model hypothetical trajectories that were based on gradual vs. saltatory changes, and prevalence of returns toward average community structure. Beta diversity among sites was variable across time, but beta partitioning consistently showed that pure spatial turnover dominated over nestedness, because many common species were consistently distributed either upstream or downstream. This study suggests that vertebrate communities in relatively undisturbed environments may display dynamics consistent with the LEC. The LEC, combined with quantification of community trajectory patterns, can help to clarify whether systems are moving about within ranges of conditions that reflect expected noise, or, conversely, have moved so far out of previous bounds, as a result of climate change or human intervention, that they are permanently changed or “novel.”

Ecological disturbances are often hypothesized to alter community assembly processes that influence variation in community composition (β‐diversity). Disturbance can cause convergence in community composition (low β‐diversity) by increasing niche selection of disturbance‐tolerant species. Alternatively, disturbance can cause divergence in community composition (high β‐diversity) by increasing habitat filtering across environmental gradients. However, because disturbance may also influence β‐diversity through random sampling effects owing to changes in the number of individuals in local communities (community size) or abundances in the regional species pool, observed patterns of β‐diversity alone cannot be used to unambiguously discern the relative importance of community assembly mechanisms. We compared β‐diversity of woody plants and inferred assembly mechanisms among unburned forests and forests managed with prescribed fires in the Missouri Ozarks, USA. Using a null‐model approach, we compared how environmental gradients influenced β‐diversity after controlling for differences in local community size and regional species abundances between unburned and burned landscapes. Observed β‐diversity was higher in burned landscapes. However, this pattern disappeared or reversed after controlling for smaller community size in burned landscapes. β‐diversity was higher than expected by chance in both landscapes, indicating an important role for processes that create clumped species distributions. Moreover, fire appeared to decrease clumping of species at broader spatial scales, suggesting homogenization of community composition through niche selection of disturbance‐tolerant species. Environmental variables, however, explained similar amounts of variation in β‐diversity in both landscapes, suggesting that disturbance did not alter the relative importance of habitat filtering. Our results indicate that contingent responses of communities to fire reflect a combination of fire‐induced changes in local community size and scale‐dependent effects of fire on species clumping across landscapes. Synthesis. Although niche‐based mechanisms of community assembly are often invoked to explain changes in community composition following disturbance, our results suggest that these changes also arise through random sampling effects owing to the influence of disturbance on community size. Comparative studies of these processes across disturbed ecosystems will provide important insights into the ecological conditions that determine when disturbance alters the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in natural and human‐modified landscapes.

Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) is hypothesized to play an important role in community assembly and the maintenance of biodiversity. However, fundamental gaps remain in our understanding of how ITV contributes to mechanisms that create spatial variation in the functional‐trait composition of communities (functional β‐diversity). Importantly, ITV may influence the perceived importance of environmental filtering across spatial scales. We examined how ITV contributes to functional β‐diversity and environmental filtering in woody plant communities in a temperate forest in the Ozark ecoregion, Missouri, USA. To test the hypothesis that ITV contributes to changes in the perceived importance of environmental filtering across scales, we compared patterns of functional β‐diversity across soil‐resource and topographic gradients at three spatial grains and three spatial extents. To quantify the contribution of ITV to functional β‐diversity, we compared patterns that included ITV in five traits (leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf water content, leaf toughness and chlorophyll content) to patterns based on species‐mean trait values. Functional β‐diversity that included ITV increased with spatial extent and decreased with spatial grain, suggesting stronger environmental filtering within spatially extensive landscapes that contain populations locally adapted to different habitats. In contrast, functional β‐diversity based on species‐mean trait values increased with spatial extent but did not change with spatial grain, suggesting weaker environmental filtering among larger communities which each contain a variety of habitats and locally adapted populations. Synthesis. Although studies typically infer community assembly mechanisms from species‐mean trait values, our study suggests that mean trait values may mask the strength of assembly mechanisms such as environmental filtering, especially in landscape‐scale studies that encompass strong environmental gradients and locally adapted populations. Our study highlights the utility of integrating ITV into studies of functional β‐diversity to better understand the ecological conditions under which trait variation within and among species contributes most strongly to patterns of biodiversity across spatial scales.

Species conservation requires an understanding of the abiotic factors driving animal-environmental relationships, especially in dynamic ecosystems like non-perennial streams. Although crayfish are one of the most threatened groups of freshwater animals and are vulnerable to climate change and ecosystem degradation, data are limited for many species. Here, we evaluated crayfish-environment relationships for the Ozark Crayfish (Faxonius ozarkae), a species commonly found in Ozark Highland streams of Arkansas and Missouri. Our objectives were to: (1) evaluate the influence of spatial position, precipitation, and local physicochemical factors on crayfish density and biomass in isolated pools over a 3-year period and (2) assess pattern consistency between age groups (juveniles and age 1 +) and over time (annually and seasonally). We found few age-specific differences in crayfish density and biomass. When evaluating spatial differences, juvenile crayfish density and biomass were generally greater in upstream pools closer to perennial surface flow, while age 1 + density and biomass did not differ between stream segments. Crayfish density and biomass differed temporally, probably because of difference in precipitation, with density and biomass being greatest in a moderately wet year (2010) and lowest in years with above (2009) and below (2011) average precipitation for both age groups. Differences in crayfish density and biomass were mostly related to local habitat (i.e., pool volume, proportion of gravel substrates, substrate diversity) and water quality (i.e., pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity) metrics. Our study adds to the growing understanding of species-environment relationships in lotic ecosystems, which will be necessary for furthering the conservation of aquatic species in non-perennial streams that are predicted to become more abundant and hydrologic variability.

Habitat fragmentation often arises from human-induced alterations to the matrix that reduce or eliminate dispersal between habitat patches. Elimination of dispersal increases local extinction and decreases recolonization. These phenomena were observed in the eastern collared lizard ( Crotaphytus collaris collaris ), which lives in the mid-continental highland region of the Ozarks (Missouri, USA) on glades: habitats of exposed bedrock that form desert-like habitats imbedded in a woodland matrix. With the onset of woodland fire suppression, glade habitats degenerated and the woodland matrix was altered to create a strong barrier to dispersal. By 1980, lizard populations in the Ozarks were rapidly going extinct. In response to this decline, some glades were restored by clearing and burning. Starting in 1984, collared lizard populations were translocated onto these restored habitats. The translocated populations persisted but did not colonize nearby glades or disperse among one another. In 1994 prescribed woodland fires were initiated, which unleashed much dispersal and colonizing behavior. Dispersal was highly nonrandom by both intrinsic variables (age, gender) and extrinsic variables (overall demography, glade population sizes, glade areas, landscape features), resulting in different classes of lizards being dominant in creating demographic cohesiveness among glades, colonizing new glades on a mountain, and colonizing new mountain systems. A dramatic transition was documented from isolated fragments, to a nonequilibrium colonizing metapopulation, and finally to a stable metapopulation. This transition is characterized by the convergence of rates of extinction and recolonization and a major alteration of dispersal probabilities and pattern in going from the nonequilibrium to stable metapopulation states.