Deep learning of estuary salinity dynamics is physically accurate at a fraction of hydrodynamic model computational cost
Galen Gorski, Salme Ellen Cook, Amelia Marie Snyder, Alison P. Appling, Theodore Paul Thompson, Jared David Smith, John C. Warner, Simon Nemer Topp
2024, Limnology and Oceanography (69) 1070-1085
Salinity dynamics in the Delaware Bay estuary are a critical water quality concern as elevated salinity can damage infrastructure and threaten drinking water supplies. Current state-of-the-art modeling approaches use hydrodynamic models, which can produce accurate results but are limited by significant computational costs. We...
Groundwater and surface-water interactions in the He‘eia watershed, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i—Insights from analysis of historical data and numerical groundwater-model simulations
Scot K. Izuka, Heidi L. Kane, Kolja Rotzoll
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5020
He‘eia and ‘Ioleka‘a Streams in the He‘eia watershed on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, receive substantial discharge from dike-impounded groundwater. Previous studies indicated that groundwater withdrawals from the watershed affect streamflow. Resource managers and users seek information that can be used to balance the needs of competing uses of groundwater and streamflow in...
Existing evidence on the effects of climate variability and climate change on ungulates in North America: A systematic map
Kate Malpeli, Sarah C. Endyke, Sarah R. Weiskopf, Laura Thompson, Ciara G. Johnson, Katherine Anne Kurth, Maxfield A. Carlin
2024, Environmental Evidence (13)
BackgroundClimate is an important driver of ungulate life-histories, population dynamics, and migratory behaviors. Climate conditions can directly impact ungulates via changes in the costs of thermoregulation and locomotion, or indirectly, via changes in habitat and forage availability, predation, and species interactions. Many studies have documented the effects of...
Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) resource selection: Trade-offs between forage and predation risk
James W. Cain III, Jacob H. Kay, Stewart G. Liley, Jay V. Gedir
2024, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (12)
Ungulates commonly select habitat with higher forage biomass and or nutritional quality to improve body condition and fitness. However, predation risk can alter ungulate habitat selection and foraging behavior and may affect their nutritional condition. Ungulates often choose areas with lower predation risk, sometimes sacrificing higher quality forage. This forage–predation...
Evaluating the potential for efficient, UAS-based reach-scale mapping of river channel bathymetry from multispectral images
Carl J. Legleiter, Lee R. Harrison
2024, Frontiers in Remote Sensing (5)
Introduction: Information on spatial patterns of water depth in river channels is valuable for numerous applications, but such data can be difficult to obtain via traditional field methods. Ongoing developments in remote sensing technology have enabled various image-based approaches for mapping river bathymetry; this study evaluated the potential to retrieve...
Apparent non-double-couple components as artifacts of moment tensor inversion
Boris Rosler, Seth Stein, Adam T. Ringler, Jiri Vackar
2024, Seismica (3)
Compilations of earthquake moment tensors from global and regional catalogs find pervasive non-double-couple (NDC) components with a mean deviation from a double-couple (DC) source of around 20%. Their distributions vary only slightly with magnitude, faulting mechanism, or geologic environments. This consistency suggests that for most earthquakes, especially smaller ones whose...
Groundwater hydrology, groundwater and surface-water interactions, aquifer testing, and groundwater-flow simulations for the Fountain Creek alluvial aquifer, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2018–20
Connor P. Newman, Cory A. Russell, Zachary D. Kisfalusi, Suzanne S. Paschke
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5119
From 2018 through 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Air Force Civil Engineering Center, conducted an integrated study of the Fountain Creek alluvial aquifer located near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The objective of the study was to characterize hydrologic conditions for the alluvial aquifer pertinent to the potential...
Estimation and comparison of 1-percent annual exceedance probability flood flows at Federal Emergency Management Agency flood insurance study flow locations across Pennsylvania
Mitchell R. Weaver, Marla H. Stuckey, James E. Colgin, Mark A. Roland
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5133
Flood-flow estimates were computed at over 5,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood insurance study (FIS) flow locations across Pennsylvania for the 1-percent annual exceedance probability flood event (1-percent AEP). Depending on a point of interest’s proximity to a streamgage, weighting techniques may be applied to obtain flood-flow estimates for...
Classification of lakebed geologic substrate in autonomously collected benthic imagery using machine learning
Joseph K. Geisz, Phillipe Alan Wernette, Peter C. Esselman
2024, Remote Sensing (16)
Mapping benthic habitats with bathymetric, acoustic, and spectral data requires georeferenced ground-truth information about habitat types and characteristics. New technologies like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) collect tens of thousands of images per mission making image-based ground truthing particularly attractive. Two types of machine learning (ML) models, random forest (RF) and...
Deep learning workflow to support in-flight processing of digital aerial imagery for wildlife population surveys
Tsung-Wei Ke, Stella X Yu, Mark D. Koneff, David L. Fronczak, Luke J. Fara, Travis Harrison, Kyle Lawrence Landolt, Enrika Hlavacek, Brian R. Lubinski, Timothy White
2024, PLoS ONE (19)
Deep learning shows promise for automating detection and classification of wildlife from digital aerial imagery to support cost-efficient remote sensing solutions for wildlife population monitoring. To support in-flight orthorectification and machine learning processing to detect and classify wildlife from imagery in near real-time, we evaluated deep learning methods that address...
Propensity score matching mitigates risk of faulty inferences in observational studies of effectiveness of restoration trials
Chad Raymond Kluender, Matthew J. Germino, Christopher A Anthony
2024, Journal of Applied Ecology (61) 1127-1137
Determining effectiveness of restoration treatments is an important requirement of adaptive management, but it can be non-trivial where only portions of large and heterogeneous landscapes of concern can be treated and sampled. Bias and non-randomness in the spatial deployment of treatment and thus sampling is nearly unavoidable in the...
Identifying an understudied interface: Preliminary evaluation of the use of retention ponds on commercial poultry farms by wild waterfowl
Jeffery D. Sullivan, Ayla McDonough, Lauren Lescure, Diann Prosser
2024, Transboundary and Emerging Diseases (2024)
While the recent incursion of highly pathogenic avian influenza into North America has resulted in notable losses to the commercial poultry industry, the mechanism by which virus enters commercial poultry houses is still not understood. One theorized mechanism is that waterfowl shed virus into the environment surrounding poultry farms, such...
Quantifying and evaluating strategies to decrease carbon dioxide emissions generated from tourism to Yellowstone National Park
Emily J. Wilkins, Dani T. Dagan, Jordan W. Smith
2024, PLOS Climate (4)
The tourism industry needs strategies to reduce emissions and hasten the achievement of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction targets. Using a case study approach, we estimated CO2 emissions related to park tourism in Yellowstone National Park (USA) generated from transit to and from the park, transit...
Effects and perceptions of weather, climate, and climate change on outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism in the United States: A systematic review
Emily J. Wilkins, Lydia Horne
2024, PLOS Climate (4)
Weather, climate, and climate change all effect outdoor recreation and tourism, and will continue to cause a multitude of effects as the climate warms. We conduct a systematic literature review to better understand how weather, climate, and climate change affect outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism across...
Range-wide genetic analysis of an endangered bumble bee (Bombus affinis, Hymenoptera: Apidae) reveals population structure, isolation by distance, and low colony abundance
John Mola, Ian S. Pearse, Michelle Boone, Elaine Evans, Mark J. Hepner, Robert Jean, Jade Kochanski, Cade Nordmeyer, Eric Runquist, Tamara A. Smith, Jaime Strange, Jay Watson, Jonathan B Koch
2024, Journal of Insect Science (24)
Declines in bumble bee species range and abundances are documented across multiple continents and have prompted the need for research to aid species recovery and conservation. The rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) is the first federally listed bumble bee species in North America. We conducted a range-wide population...
The potential influence of genome-wide adaptive divergence on conservation translocation outcome in an isolated greater sage-grouse population
Shawna J Zimmerman, Cameron L. Aldridge, Michael A Schroeder, Jennifer A. Fike, Robert S. Cornman, Sara J. Oyler-McCance
2024, Conservation Biology (38)
Conservation translocations are an important conservation tool commonly employed to augment declining or reestablish extirpated populations. One goal of augmentation is to increase genetic diversity and reduce the risk of inbreeding depression (i.e., genetic rescue). However, introducing individuals from significantly diverged populations risks disrupting coadapted traits and...
Bathymetric and velocimetric surveys at highway bridges crossing the Missouri River between Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, May 19–26, 2021
Richard J. Huizinga
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5021
Bathymetric and velocimetric data were collected by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Transportation, near nine bridges at eight highway crossings of the Missouri River between Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, from May 19 to 26, 2021. A multibeam echosounder mapping system was used...
Measuring and interpreting the surface and shallow subsurface process influences on coastal wetland elevation: A review
Donald Cahoon
2024, Estuaries and Coasts (47) 1708-1734
A century ago, measuring elevation in tidal wetlands proved difficult, as survey leveling of soft marsh soils relative to a fixed datum was error prone. For 60 years, vertical accretion measures from marker horizons were used as analogs of elevation change. But without a direct measure of elevation, it was not...
Vegetation, fuels, and fire-behavior responses to linear fuel-break treatments in and around burned sagebrush steppe: Are we breaking the grass-fire cycle?
Matthew J. Germino, Samuel J. Price, Susan J Prichard
2024, Fire Ecology (20)
BackgroundLinear fuel breaks are being implemented to moderate fire behavior and improve wildfire containment in semiarid landscapes such as the sagebrush steppe of North America, where extensive losses in perennial vegetation and ecosystem functioning are resulting from invasion by exotic annual grasses (EAGs) that foster large and recurrent...
Comparing modern identification methods for wild bees: Metabarcoding and image-based morphological taxonomic assignment
Cassandra Smith, Robert S. Cornman, Jennifer A. Fike, Johanna M. Kraus, Sara J. Oyler-McCance, Carrie E. Givens, Michelle Hladik, Mark W. Vandever, Dana W. Kolpin, Kelly Smalling
2024, PLoS ONE (19)
With the decline of bee populations worldwide, studies determining current wild bee distributions and diversity are increasingly important. Wild bee identification is often completed by experienced taxonomists or by genetic analysis. The current study was designed to compare two methods of identification including: (1) morphological identification...
Climate-driven increases in stream metal concentrations in mineralized watersheds throughout the Colorado Rocky Mountains, USA
Andrew H. Manning, Tanya N. Petach, Robert L. Runkel, Diane M. McKnight
2024, Water Resources Research (60)
Increasing stream metal concentrations apparently caused by climate warming have been reported for a small number of mountain watersheds containing hydrothermally altered bedrock with abundant sulfide minerals (mineralized watersheds). Such increases are concerning and could negatively impact downstream ecosystem health, water resources, and mine-site remediation efforts. However,...
Paleogene Earth perturbations in the US Atlantic Coastal Plain (PEP-US): Coring transects of hyperthermals to understand past carbon injections and ecosystem responses
Marci M. Robinson, Kenneth Miller, Tali Babila, Tim J Bralower, Jim Browning, Marlow Cramwinckel, Monika Doubrawa, Gavin L Foster, Megan Fung, Sean D. Kinney, Maria Makarova, Pete McLaughlin, Paul Pearson, Ursula Rohl, Morgan Schaller, Jean Self-Trail, Appy Sluijs, Thomas Westerhold, James R. Wright, James Zachos
2024, Scientific Drilling (33) 47-65
The release of over 4500 Gt (gigatonnes) of carbon at the Paleocene–Eocene boundary provides the closest geological analog to modern anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The cause(s) of and responses to the resulting Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and attendant carbon isotopic excursion (CIE) remain enigmatic and intriguing...
Recent advances in characterizing the crustal stress field and future applications of stress data: Perspectives from North America
Jens-Erik Lundstern
2024, Geological Society, London, Special Publications (546)
The stress field controls patterns of crustal deformation, including which faults are likeliest to cause earthquakes or transmit fluids. Since the 1950s, maps of maximum horizontal stress (SHmax) orientations have advanced dramatically, and the style of faulting (relative principal stress magnitudes) has recently been mapped in some...
Current and projected flood exposure for Alaska coastal communities
Richard Michael Buzard, Christopher V. Maio, Li H. Erikson, Jacquelyn R. Overbeck, Nicole E. M. Kinsman, Benjamin M. Jones
2024, Scientific Reports (14)
Globally, coastal communities experience flood hazards that are projected to worsen from climate change and sea level rise. The 100-year floodplain or record flood are commonly used to identify risk areas for planning purposes. Remote communities often lack measured flood elevations and require innovative approaches to...
Land-use and land-cover change in the Lower Rio Grande Ecoregions, Texas, 2001–2011
Mark A. Drummond, Michael P. Stier, Jamie L. McBeth
2024, Data Report 1185
Urban growth and other land-use changes were examined in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and Alluvial Floodplain ecoregions in Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border. The analysis focused on understanding the types and causes of land change as well as the recovery of natural land-cover types between years 2001 and 2011....
