Demography and behavior of polar bears summering on land in Alaska
Elizabeth L. Peacock
2014, Report
Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the southern Beaufort Sea population (SB) are spending increased time on the coastal North Slope of Alaska between July and October (Gleason and Rode 2010). The duration spent on land by polar bears, satellite collared on the sea-ice in the spring, during the summer and...
A geologic approach to field methods in fluvial geomorphology
Faith A. Fitzpatrick
Mary J Thornbush, Casey D Allen, Faith A. Fitzpatrick, editor(s)
2014, Book chapter, Geomorphological Fieldwork
A geologic approach to field methods in fluvial geomorphology is useful for understanding causes and consequences of past, present, and possible future perturbations in river behavior and floodplain dynamics. Field methods include characterizing river planform and morphology changes and floodplain sedimentary sequences over long periods of time along a longitudinal...
Utilizing multi-sensor fire detections to map fires in the United States
Stephen M. Howard, Joshua J. Picotte, Michael Coan
2014, Conference Paper, The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XL-1,
In 2006, the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project began a cooperative effort between the US Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S.Geological Survey (USGS) to map and assess burn severity all large fires that have occurred in the United States since 1984. Using Landsat imagery, MTBS is mandated to...
Population demographics and life history of the round hickorynut (Obovaria subrotunda) in the Duck River, Tennessee
Chase Ehlo, James B. Layzer
2014, American Midland Naturalist (171) 1-15
Population characteristics and life history aspects of healthy mussel populations are poorly understood. The reproductive cycle, age and growth, and population structure of Obovaria subrotunda were examined at four sites in the middle Duck River, Tennessee. Obovaria subrotunda was confirmed to be a bradytictic species, spawning in the late summer and holding glochidia in...
Resolving terrestrial ecosystem processes along a subgrid topographic gradient for an earth-system model
Z M Subin, Paul C.D. Milly, B N Sulman, Sergey Malyshev, E Shevliakova
2014, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (11) 8443-8492
Soil moisture is a crucial control on surface water and energy fluxes, vegetation, and soil carbon cycling. Earth-system models (ESMs) generally represent an areal-average soil-moisture state in gridcells at scales of 50–200 km and as a result are not able to capture the nonlinear effects of topographically-controlled subgrid heterogeneity in...
Arsenic speciation and sorption in natural environments
Kate M. Campbell, D. Kirk Nordstrom
2014, Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry (79) 185-216
Aqueous arsenic speciation, or the chemical forms in which arsenic exists in water, is a challenging, interesting, and complicated aspect of environmental arsenic geochemistry. Arsenic has the ability to form a wide range of chemical bonds with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur, resulting in a large variety of compounds that...
Use of multi-sensor active fire detections to map fires in the United States: the future of monitoring trends in burn severity
Joshua J. Picotte, Michael Coan, Stephen M. Howard
2014, Conference Paper, Proceedings: Wildland fire in the Appalachians: Discussions among managers and scientists. General Technical Report SRS-199
The effort to utilize satellite-based MODIS, AVHRR, and GOES fire detections from the Hazard Monitoring System (HMS) to identify undocumented fires in Florida and improve the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) mapping process has yielded promising results. This method was augmented using regression tree models to identify burned/not-burned pixels...
Groundwater conditions in Utah, spring of 2014
Carole B. Burden
2014, Cooperative Investigations Report 55
This is the fifty-first in a series of annual reports that describe groundwater conditions in Utah. Reports in this series, published cooperatively by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Utah Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water Rights, and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, Division of Water Quality, provide...
Ground-motion site effects from multimethod shear-wave velocity characterization at 16 seismograph stations deployed for aftershocks of the August 2011 Mineral, Virginia earthquake
William J. Stephenson, Jackson K. Odum, Daniel E. McNamara, Robert A. Williams, Stephen J Angster
2014, GSA Special Papers (509) 47-65
We characterize shear-wave velocity versus depth (Vs profile) at 16 portable seismograph sites through the epicentral region of the 2011 Mw 5.8 Mineral (Virginia, USA) earthquake to investigate ground-motion site effects in the area. We used a multimethod acquisition and analysis approach, where active-source horizontal shear (SH) wave reflection and refraction...
Fine-grained linings of leveed channels facilitate runout of granular flows
B.P. Kokelaar, R. L. Graham, J.M.N.T. Gray, James W. Vallance
2014, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (385) 172-180
Catastrophic dense granular flows, such as occur in rock avalanches, debris flows and pyroclastic flows, move as fully shearing mixtures that have approximately 60 vol.% solids and tend to segregate to form coarse-grained fronts and leveed channels. Levees restrict spreading of unconfined flows and form as coarse particles that become...
Mammoth Mountain and its mafic periphery—A late Quaternary volcanic field in eastern California
Wes Hildreth, Judith Fierstein, Duane E. Champion, Andrew T. Calvert
2014, Geosphere (10) 1315-1365
The trachydacite complex of Mammoth Mountain and an array of contemporaneous mafic volcanoes in its periphery together form a discrete late Pleistocene magmatic system that is thermally and compositionally independent of the adjacent subalkaline Long Valley system (California, USA). The Mammoth system first erupted ca. 230 ka, last erupted ca....
Northern Pintail
Robert G. Clark, Joseph P. Fleskes, Karla L. Guyn, David A. Haukos, Jane E. Austin, Michael R. Miller
2014, The Birds of North America
This medium-sized dabbling duck of slender, elegant lines and conservative plumage coloration is circumpolar in distribution and abundant in North America, with core nesting habitat in Alaska and the Prairie Pothole Region of southern Canada and the northern Great Plains. Breeders favor shallow wetlands interspersed throughout prairie grasslands or arctic...
Adult survival, apparent lamb survival, and body condition of desert bighorn sheep in relation to habitat and precipitation on the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, Arizona
Matthew Overstreet, Colleen A. Caldwell, James W. Cain III
2014, Cooperator Science Series 109-2014
The decline of desert bighorn sheep on the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge (KNWR) beginning in 2003 stimulated efforts to determine the factors limiting survival and recruitment. We 1) determined pregnancy rates, body fat, and estimated survival rates of adults and lambs; 2) investigated the relationship between precipitation, forage conditions, previous...
Segmentation of plate coupling, fate of subduction fluids, and modes of arc magmatism in Cascadia, inferred from magnetotelluric resistivity
Philip E. Wannamaker, Rob L. Evans, Paul A. Bedrosian, Martyn J. Unsworth, Virginie Maris, R. Shane McGary
2014, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (15) 4230-4253
Five magnetotelluric (MT) profiles have been acquired across the Cascadia subduction system and transformed using 2-D and 3-D nonlinear inversion to yield electrical resistivity cross sections to depths of ∼200 km. Distinct changes in plate coupling, subduction fluid evolution, and modes of arc magmatism along the length of Cascadia are...
Tracking changes in volcanic systems with seismic Interferometry
Matthew M. Haney, Alicia J. Hotovec-Ellis, Ninfa L. Bennington, Silvio De Angelis, Clifford Thurber
2014, Book chapter, Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering
The detection and evaluation of time-dependent changes at volcanoes form the foundation upon which successful volcano monitoring is built. Temporal changes at volcanoes occur over all time scales and may be obvious (e.g., earthquake swarms) or subtle (e.g., a slow, steady increase in the level of tremor). Some of the...
2013 status of the Lake Ontario lower trophic levels
Kristen T. Holeck, Lars G. Rudstam, Christopher Hotaling, Russ D. McCullough, Dave Lemon, Web Pearsall, Jana R. Lantry, Michael J. Connerton, Steve LaPan, Betsy Trometer, Brian F. Lantry, Maureen Walsh, Brian Weidel
2014, NYSDEC Lake Ontario Annual Report 2013-16
Phosphorus showed high variation across nearshore (10 m depth) sites but was more stable at offshore (20 m and deeper) stations. In June and July, sites at the mouth of the Niagara River and at Oak Orchard had high phosphorus concentrations (20 – 46 μg/L). Epilimnetic average April-Oct total phosphorus...
Hydroclimatic regimes: a distributed water-balance framework for hydrologic assessment, classification, and management
Peter K. Weiskel, David M. Wolock, Phillip J. Zarriello, Richard M. Vogel, Sara B. Levin, Robert M. Lent
2014, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (18) 3855-3872
Runoff-based indicators of terrestrial water availability are appropriate for humid regions, but have tended to limit our basic hydrologic understanding of drylands – the dry-subhumid, semiarid, and arid regions which presently cover nearly half of the global land surface. In response, we introduce an indicator framework that gives equal weight...
Integrating recent land cover mapping efforts to update the National Gap Analysis Program's species habitat map
Alexa McKerrow, A. Davidson, Todd Earnhardt, Abigail L. Benson
Charles Toth, Thomas Holm, Boris Jutz, editor(s)
2014, Conference Paper, Proceedings: ISPRS Technical Commission I Symposium (Volume XL-1)
Over the past decade, great progress has been made to develop national extent land cover mapping products to address natural resource issues. One of the core products of the GAP Program is range-wide species distribution models for nearly 2000 terrestrial vertebrate species in the U.S. We rely on deductive modeling...
Probing reservoir-triggered earthquakes in Koyna, India, through scientific deep drilling
H. Gupta, Shailesh Nayak, William L. Ellsworth, Y. J. B. Rao, S. Rajan, B.K. Bansal, N. Purnachandra Rao, S. Roy, K. Arora, R. Mohan, V. M. Tiwari, H. V. S. Satyanarayana, P. K. Patro, D. Shashidhar, K. Mallika
2014, Scientific Drilling (18) 5-9
We report here the salient features of the recently concluded International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) workshop in Koyna, India. This workshop was a sequel to the earlier held ICDP workshop in Hyderabad and Koyna in 2011. A total of 49 experts (37 from India and 12 from 8...
Estuarine removal of glacial iron and implications for iron fluxes to the ocean
Andrew W. Schroth, John Crusius, Ian Hoyer, Robert Campbell
2014, Geophysical Research Letters (41) 3951-3958
While recent work demonstrates that glacial meltwater provides a substantial and relatively labile flux of the micronutrient iron to oceans, the role of high-latitude estuary environments as a potential sink of glacial iron is unknown. Here we present the first quantitative description of iron removal in a meltwater-dominated estuary. We...
Mapping saltwater intrusion in the Biscayne Aquifer, Miami-Dade County, Florida using transient electromagnetic sounding
David V. Fitterman
2014, Journal of Environmental & Engineering Geophysics (19) 33-43
Saltwater intrusion in southern Florida poses a potential threat to the public drinking-water supply that is typically monitored using water samples and electromagnetic induction logs collected from a network of wells. Transient electromagnetic (TEM) soundings are a complementary addition to the monitoring program because of their ease of use, low...
Thermodynamic properties for arsenic minerals and aqueous species
D. Kirk Nordstrom, Juraj Majzlan, Erich Konigsberger
Robert J. Bowell, Charles N. Alpers, Heather E. Jamieson, D. Kirk Nordstrom, Juraj Majzlan, editor(s)
2014, Book chapter, Arsenic: Environmental geochemistry, mineralogy, and microbiology (Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry no. 79)
Quantitative geochemical calculations are not possible without thermodynamic databases and considerable advances in the quantity and quality of these databases have been made since the early days of Lewis and Randall (1923), Latimer (1952), and Rossini et al. (1952). Oelkers et al. (2009) wrote, “The creation...
Hells Canyon to the Bitterroot front: A transect from the accretionary margin eastward across the Idaho batholith
Reed S. Lewis, Keegan L. Smith, Richard M. Gaschnig, Todd A. LaMaskin, Karen Lund, Keith D. Gray, Basil Tikoff, Tor Stetson-Lee, Nicholas Moore
2014, Book chapter, Exploring the Northern Rocky Mountains
This field guide covers geology across north-central Idaho from the Snake River in the west across the Bitterroot Mountains to the east to near Missoula, Montana. The regional geology includes a much-modified Mesozoic accretionary boundary along the western side of Idaho across which allochthonous Permian to Cretaceous arc complexes of...
Land cover characterization and mapping of South America for the year 2010 using Landsat 30 m satellite data
Chandra Giri, Jordan Long
2014, Remote Sensing (6) 9494-9510
Detailed and accurate land cover and land cover change information is needed for South America because the continent is in constant flux, experiencing some of the highest rates of land cover change and forest loss in the world. The land cover data available for the entire continent are too coarse...
Integrating research tools to support the management of social-ecological systems under climate change
Brian W. Miller, Jeffrey T. Morisette
2014, Ecology and Society (19) 1-12
Developing resource management strategies in the face of climate change is complicated by the considerable uncertainty associated with projections of climate and its impacts and by the complex interactions between social and ecological variables. The broad, interconnected nature of this challenge has resulted in calls for analytical frameworks that integrate...
