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Context Montane meadows play an important hydrologic role in headwater catchments, but past land use has largely degraded their condition. Low-tech restoration methods, such as beaver dam analogs (BDAs), are increasingly used to support recovery of incised streams by promoting key geomorphic processes. However, there remains a need for studies...

Community wildfire readiness includes homeowner wildfire risk mitigation and wildfire evacuation preparedness. In 2021 and 2022, the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Center partnered with Chelan County Fire District #3 (CCFD #3) to learn how CCFD #3 can effectively engage with residents about preparing for a wildfire event and mitigating wildfire risk...

Study region: Headwaters of the upper Colorado River basin (UCOL), USAStudy focus: Surface-water and groundwater numerical models incorporating water-use information were used to investigate changes in climate, water use, and simulated hydrologic responses of snow processes, evapotranspiration, groundwater, and streamflow during recent wet (1982–1999) and drought (2000–2022) periods in the...

Habitat and water quality were historically degraded within the St. Clair-Detroit River System (SCDRS). Beginning in 2004, extensive habitat restoration projects were implemented remediating losses of fish spawning beds and shoreline areas. Monitoring of post-restoration activities documented recovering fish populations; however, angler response remains unknown. Extensive creel surveys were conducted...

The multi-agency Lake Ontario spring prey fish survey quantifies changes in pelagic prey fish populations, in particular Alewife Alosa pseudoharengus, which are the primary prey supporting the lake’s sport fishes. The 2025 survey included 230 trawls in the main lake and embayments and sampled depths from 5.5 to 245 m...

No abstract available....

Seawater intrusion threatens groundwater resources in coastal regions, including southern Baldwin County, Alabama, where the freshwater-saltwater interface dynamics remain poorly understood. To address this gap, this study uses combined physics-based and machine-learning models to quantify seawater intrusion caused by natural (storm surges) and anthropogenic (human activities) perturbations. The long short-term...

Paralytic shellfish toxins (PSTs), including saxitoxin (STX) and its congeners, are neurotoxins that can be produced during harmful algal blooms and cause illness or death in humans, fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Since 2014, multiple large-scale seabird mortality events have occurred in Alaska waters, with STXs detected in some carcasses....

Current knowledge of class-I cytokine receptors comes primarily from studies in jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes), and their origin and evolution remain unresolved. In this study, we identified a leptin receptor-like sequence (LepRL) and three interleukin-6 receptor subunit b-like sequences (IL6RBL) from a jawless vertebrate (cyclostome), the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus). Based...

On September 19, 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) held a virtual workshop titled “Potential for Evaluation of Fire Models with Remote Sensing Data Workshop” to assess the feasibility of using remotely sensed datasets to evaluate next-generation wildland fire behavior models. Remote sensing and fire modelling experts gathered to: (1)...

The deleterious effects of directly-connected impervious surfaces on urban streams have been widely recognized. To deal with these effects, the use of stormwater control measures that aim to disconnect impervious surfaces and prevent stormwater from reaching the stream has surged. However, we lack widespread use of consistent metrics that describe...

Tungsten appears on the 2018 and 2022 U.S. Geological Survey critical mineral lists in part because of a very high global production concentration in China, which produces almost 83 percent of the world’s mined tungsten. Using known parameters and values from other tungsten mining operations, we created hypothetical scenarios in...

Dynamic earthquake triggering is commonly identified through the temporal correlation between increased seismicity rates and global earthquakes that are possible triggering events. However, correlation does not imply causation. False positives may occur when unrelated seismicity rate changes coincidently occur at around the time of candidate triggers. We investigate the expected...

Since the 1980s, monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) populations across North America have declined by 80–95%. Although several studies have implicated pesticides as a contributing factor to their population declines, our understanding of monarch exposure levels in nature remains limited. In January 2024, a mass mortality event near an overwintering...

Seawater intrusion (SWI) affects coastal landscapes worldwide. Here we describe the hydrologic pathways through which SWI occurs - over land via storm surge or tidal flooding, under land via groundwater transport, and through watersheds via natural and artificial surface water channels—and how human modifications to those pathways alter patterns of...

Key to the success of spaceborne missions is understanding snowmelt in our warming climate, as this has implications for nearly 2 billion people. An obstacle is that surface reflectance products over snow show an erroneous hook with decreases in the visible wavelengths, causing per-band and broadband reflectance errors of up...

Geometrically complex, multifault ruptures have been observed in recent, damaging earthquakes in southeastern California, sparking renewed efforts to identify physical conditions that promote or inhibit fault discontinuity-spanning coseismic ruptures. The likelihood of ruptures propagating across fault discontinuities is thought to be partly controlled by fault geometries, rupture direction, and the...

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed under the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), serves as a catalyst for advancing new scenarios and models focused on biodiversity and ecosystem services within the broader research community. In particular, the framework facilitates the development of scenarios and models that...

No abstract available. ...

Hydrologic alterations within the Everglades have degraded American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) habitat, reduced prey base, and increased physiological stress. Alligator body condition declined across many management areas from 2000 through 2014, prompting us to investigate the relationship between their intraspecific isotopic niche dynamics and body condition. Alligators within the estuary...

Animal navigation has long been a fascinating but bewildering subject. Humans and animals might well share similar navigational strategies because they developed within the same physical environments. A “map-and-compass” model has been proposed to explain the two-step avian navigational process, but the “map” step has remained elusive. Although scalar values...

The start of the Mauna Loa 2022 eruption in the Mokuʻāweoweo summit caldera was entirely captured through webcam videos. We analyzed footage from the ~ 7-h summit episode, processing > 87,000 frames using a newly automated method to measure fountain heights, fissure lengths, and inflight ejecta volumes. The summit episode comprised four phases. In...

Closed depressions and sinking streams in karst landscapes pose difficulties for water-resources management, in the construction of roads and other public works, and in hydrologic and hydrogeomorphic analyses. Digital elevation models (DEMs) can be used to identify the location and determine the size and shape of closed depressions, but separating...

The National Fish Habitat Partnership (NFHP) is a science based, non-regulatory, partnership-driven effort to conserve fish habitat across the USA. The NFHP was developed in the early to mid-2000s in response to the noted declines to fish populations and their associated habitats across the USA with the effort led by...

Introduction: Rangeland ponds are vital to the livelihoods of pastoral and agropastoral communities in Africa, providing an important source of water for livestock. However, sparse instrumentation across much of Africa makes it extremely challenging to monitor surface water availability in these areas. Model estimates of surface water, for example, as...