Ecosystem carbon stocks and sequestration potential of federal lands across the conterminous United States
Zhengxi Tan, Shuguang Liu, Terry L. Sohl, Yiping Wu, Claudia J. Young
2015, PNAS (112) 12723-12728
Federal lands across the conterminous United States (CONUS) account for 23.5% of the CONUS terrestrial area but have received no systematic studies on their ecosystem carbon (C) dynamics and contribution to the national C budgets. The methodology for US Congress-mandated national biological C sequestration potential assessment was used to evaluate...
Comparing ecoregional classifications for natural areas management in the Klamath Region, USA
Daniel A. Sarr, Andrew Duff, Eric C. Dinger, Sarah L. Shafer, Michael Wing, Nathaniel E. Seavy, John D. Alexander
2015, Natural Areas Journal (35) 360-377
We compared three existing ecoregional classification schemes (Bailey, Omernik, and World Wildlife Fund) with two derived schemes (Omernik Revised and Climate Zones) to explore their effectiveness in explaining species distributions and to better understand natural resource geography in the Klamath Region, USA. We analyzed presence/absence data derived from digital distribution...
Use of phosphorus to reduce blooms of the benthic diatom Didymosphenia geminata in an oligotrophic stream
Daniel A. James, Max L. Bothwell, Steven R. Chipps, John Carreiro
2015, Freshwater Science (34) 1272-1281
Blooms of the benthic alga, Didymosphenia geminata [Lyngbye (Schmidt)], were first documented in Rapid Creek, South Dakota, in 2002 and have since been associated with changes to aquatic resources. Low concentration of P has been associated with D. geminata stalk development (i.e., blooms), so we considered elevating P as a...
Transport, dam passage, and size selection of adult Atlantic Salmon in the Penobscot River, Maine
Douglas B. Sigourney, Joseph D. Zydlewski, Edward Hughes, Oliver Cox
2015, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (35) 1164-1176
Prior to 2012, returning adult Atlantic Salmon Salmo salar had to pass through fishways at three dams in the lower section of the Penobscot River, Maine: Veazie Dam (river kilometer [rkm] 48; removed in 2013), Great Works Dam (rkm 60; removed in 2012), and Milford Dam (rkm 62). To facilitate...
Evidence of a higher late-Holocene treeline along the Continental Divide in central Colorado
Paul E. Carrara, John McGeehin
2015, The Holocene (25) 1829-1837
Using a combination of 23 radiocarbon ages and annual ring counts from 18 Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) remnants above the local present-day limits, a period of higher treeline has been determined for two sites near the Continental Divide in central Colorado. The highest remnants were found about 30 m...
Early Holocene Great Salt Lake
Charles G. Oviatt, David B. Madsen, David M. Miller, Robert S. Thompson, John P. McGeehin
2015, Quaternary Research (84) 57-68
Shorelines and surficial deposits (including buried forest-floor mats and organic-rich wetland sediments) show that Great Salt Lake did not rise higher than modern lake levels during the earliest Holocene (11.5–10.2 cal ka BP; 10–9 14C ka BP). During that period, finely laminated, organic-rich muds (sapropel) containing brine-shrimp cysts and...
Downscaling global land-use/land-cover projections for use in region-level state-and-transition simulation modeling
Jason T. Sherba, Benjamin M. Sleeter, Adam W. Davis, Owen P. Parker
2015, AIMS Environmental Science (2) 623-647
Global land-use/land-cover (LULC) change projections and historical datasets are typically available at coarse grid resolutions and are often incompatible with modeling applications at local to regional scales. The difficulty of downscaling and reapportioning global gridded LULC change projections to regional boundaries is a barrier to the use of these datasets...
Tracing the cycling and fate of the explosive 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene in coastal marine systems with a stable isotopic tracer, 15N-[TNT]
Richard W. Smith, Penny Vlahos, J.K. Bohlke, Thivanka Ariyarathna, Mark Ballentine, Christopher Cooper, Stephen Fallis, Thomas J. Groshens, Craig R. Tobias
2015, Environmental Science & Technology (49) 12223-12231
2,4,6-Trinitrotoluene (TNT) has been used as a military explosive for over a hundred years. Contamination concerns have arisen as a result of manufacturing and use on a large scale; however, despite decades of work addressing TNT contamination in the environment, its fate in marine ecosystems is not fully resolved. Here...
Point spread functions for earthquake source imaging: An interpretation based on seismic interferometry
Hisashi Nakahara, Matthew M. Haney
2015, Geophysical Journal International (202) 54-61
Recently, various methods have been proposed and applied for earthquake source imaging, and theoretical relationships among the methods have been studied. In this study, we make a follow-up theoretical study to better understand the meanings of earthquake source imaging. For imaging problems, the point spread function (PSF) is used to...
Linking state-and-transition simulation and timber supply models for forest biomass production scenarios
Jennifer Costanza, Robert C. Abt, Alexa McKerrow, Jaime Collazo
2015, AIMS Environmental Science (2) 180-202
We linked state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) with an economics-based timber supply model to examine landscape dynamics in North Carolina through 2050 for three scenarios of forest biomass production. Forest biomass could be an important source of renewable energy in the future, but there is currently much uncertainty about how biomass...
Building a multi-scaled geospatial temporal ecology database from disparate data sources: Fostering open science through data reuse
Patricia A. Soranno, E.G. Bissell, Kendra S. Cheruvelil, Samuel T. Christel, Sarah M. Collins, C. Emi Fergus, Christopher T. Filstrup, Jean-Francois Lapierre, Noah R. Lotting, Samantha K. Oliver, Caren E. Scott, Nicole J. Smith, Scott Stopyak, Shuai Yuan, Mary Tate Bremigan, John A. Downing, Corinna Gries, Emily N. Henry, Nick K. Skaff, Emily H. Stanley, Craig A. Stow, Pang-Ning Tan, Tyler Wagner, Katherine E. Webster
2015, GigaScience (4)
Although there are considerable site-based data for individual or groups of ecosystems, these datasets are widely scattered, have different data formats and conventions, and often have limited accessibility. At the broader scale, national datasets exist for a large number of geospatial features of land, water, and air that are needed...
Is income breeding an appropriate construct for waterfowl?
Adam K. Janke, Michael J. Anteau, Nicholas Markl, Joshua D. Stafford
2015, Journal of Ornithology (165) 755-762
Breeding birds use a range of nutrient accumulation and allocation strategies to meet the nutritional demands of clutch formation and incubation. On one end of the spectrum, capital breeders use stored nutrients acquired prior to clutch formation and incubation to sustain metabolism during reproduction, while on the opposite end, income...
Spatial and temporal variability in growth of southern flounder (Paralichthys lethostigma)
Stephen R. Midway, Tyler Wagner, Stephen A. Arnott, Patrick Biondo, Fernando Martinez-Andrade, Thomas F. Wadsworth
2015, Fisheries Research (167) 323-332
Delineation of stock structure is important for understanding the ecology and management of many fish populations, particularly those with wide-ranging distributions and high levels of harvest. Southern flounder (Paralichthys lethostigma) is a popular commercial and recreational species along the southeast Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico, USA. Recent studies have...
Sea level and turbidity controls on mangrove soil surface elevation change
Catherine E. Lovelock, Maria Fernanda Adame, Vicki Bennion, Matthew Hayes, Ruth Reef, Nadia Santini, Donald R. Cahoon
2015, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (153) 1-9
Increases in sea level are a threat to seaward fringing mangrove forests if levels of inundation exceed the physiological tolerance of the trees; however, tidal wetlands can keep pace with sea level rise if soil surface elevations can increase at the same pace as sea level rise. Sediment accretion on...
Habitat quality from individual- and population-level perspectives and implications for management
Than J. Boves, Amanda D. Rodewald, Petra Bohall Wood, David A. Buehler, Jeffrey L. Larkin, T. Bently Wigley, Patrick D. Keyser
2015, Wildlife Society Bulletin (39) 443-447
Many wildlife management prescriptions are either implicitly or explicitly designed to improve habitat quality for a focal species, but habitat quality is often difficult to quantify. Depending upon the approach used to define and identify high-quality habitat, management decisions may differ widely. Although individual-level measures of habitat quality based on...
Predicting redox conditions in groundwater at a regional scale
Anthony J. Tesoriero, Silvia Terziotti, Daniel B. Abrams
2015, Environmental Science & Technology (49) 9657-9664
Defining the oxic-suboxic interface is often critical for determining pathways for nitrate transport in groundwater and to streams at the local scale. Defining this interface on a regional scale is complicated by the spatial variability of reaction rates. The probability of oxic groundwater in the Chesapeake Bay watershed was predicted...
Linking degradation status with ecosystem vulnerability to environmental change
David G. Angeler, Didier L. Baho, Craig R. Allen, Richard K. Johnson
2015, Oecologia (178) 899-913
Environmental change can cause regime shifts in ecosystems, potentially threatening ecosystem services. It is unclear if the degradation status of ecosystems correlates with their vulnerability to environmental change, and thus the risk of future regime shifts. We assessed resilience in acidified (degraded) and circumneutral (undegraded) lakes with long-term data (1988–2012),...
The distribution of selected elements and minerals in soil of the conterminous United States
Laurel G. Woodruff, William F. Cannon, David B. Smith, Federico Solano
2015, Journal of Geochemical Exploration (154) 49-60
In 2007, the U.S. Geological Survey initiated a low-density (1 site per 1600 km2, 4857 sites) geochemical and mineralogical survey of soil of the conterminous United States as part of the North American Soil Geochemical Landscapes Project. Three soil samples were collected, if possible, from each site; (1) a sample from...
Patterns and predictability in the intra-annual organic carbon variability across the boreal and hemiboreal landscape
Julia K. Hytteborn, Johan Temnerud, Richard B. Alexander, Elizabeth W. Boyer, Martyn N. Futter, Mats Froberg, Joel Dahne, Kevin H. Bishop
2015, Science of the Total Environment (520) 260-269
Factors affecting total organic carbon (TOC) concentrations in 215 watercourses across Sweden were investigated using parameter parsimonious regression approaches to explain spatial and temporal variabilities of the TOC water quality responses. We systematically quantified the effects of discharge, seasonality, and long-term trend as factors controlling intra-annual (among year) and...
Diverting lava flows in the lab
Hannah R. Dietterich, Katharine V. Cashman, Alison C. Rust, Einat Lev
2015, Nature Geoscience (8) 494-496
Recent volcanic eruptions in Hawai'i, Iceland and Cape Verde highlight the challenges of mitigating hazards when lava flows threaten infrastructure. Diversion barriers are the most common form of intervention, but historical attempts to divert lava flows have met with mixed success and there has been little systematic analysis of optimal barrier...
Climate-induced lake drying causes heterogeneous reductions in waterfowl species richness
Jennifer K. Roach, Dennis B. Griffith
2015, Landscape Ecology (30) 1005-1022
ContextLake size has declined on breeding grounds for international populations of waterfowl.ObjectivesOur objectives were to (1) model the relationship between waterfowl species richness and lake size; (2) use the model and trends in lake size to project historical, contemporary, and...
Opinion: Endogenizing culture in sustainability science research and policy
Marcellus M. Caldas, Matthew R. Sanderson, Martha E. Mather, Melinda D. Daniels, Jason S. Bergtold, Joseph Aistrup, Jessica L. Heier Stamm, David A. Haukos, Kyle R. Douglas-Mankin, Aleksey Y. Sheshukov, David Lopez-Carr
2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (112) 8157-8159
Integrating the analysis of natural and social systems to achieve sustainability has been an international scientific goal for years (1, 2). However, full integration has proven challenging, especially in regard to the role of culture (3), which is often missing from the complex sustainability equation. To...
Parameter estimation for groundwater models under uncertain irrigation data
Yonas Demissie, Albert J. Valocchi, Ximing Cai, Nicholas Brozovic, Gabriel B. Senay, Mekonnen Gebremichael
2015, Groundwater (53) 614-625
The success of modeling groundwater is strongly influenced by the accuracy of the model parameters that are used to characterize the subsurface system. However, the presence of uncertainty and possibly bias in groundwater model source/sink terms may lead to biased estimates of model parameters and model predictions when the standard...
Variables associated with detection probability, detection latency, and behavioral responses of Golden-winged Warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera)
Kyle R. Aldinger, Petra B. Wood
2015, The Condor (117) 364-375
Detection probability during point counts and its associated variables are important considerations for bird population monitoring and have implications for conservation planning by influencing population estimates. During 2008–2009, we evaluated variables hypothesized to be associated with detection probability, detection latency, and behavioral responses of male Golden-winged Warblers in pastures in...
Enhanced microbial coalbed methane generation: A review of research, commercial activity, and remaining challenges
Daniel J. Ritter, David S. Vinson, Elliott P. Barnhart, Denise M. Akob, Matthew W. Fields, Al B. Cunningham, William H. Orem, Jennifer C. McIntosh
2015, International Journal of Coal Geology (146) 28-41
Coalbed methane (CBM) makes up a significant portion of the world’s natural gas resources. The discovery that approximately 20% of natural gas is microbial in origin has led to interest in microbially enhanced CBM (MECoM), which involves stimulating microorganisms to produce additional CBM from existing production wells. This paper reviews...
