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The Great Lakes strain of viral haemorrhagic septicaemia virus IVb (VHSV-IVb) is capable of infecting a wide number of naive species and has been associated with large fish kills in the Midwestern United States since its discovery in 2005. The yellow perch, Perca flavescens (Mitchill), a freshwater species commonly found throughout inland...

The Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite was launched on November 21, 2000, as part of a one-year technology demonstration mission. The mission was extended because of the value it continued to add to the scientific community. EO-1 has now been operational for more than a decade, providing both multispectral and hyperspectral...

We examined the effects of acclimation water temperature,live‐well (LW) water temperature,and LW dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration on survival of adult Walleyes Sander vitreus subjected to simulated tournament conditions (angling,LW confinement,and weigh‐in procedures) under controlled laboratory conditions. We tested three acclimation temperatures (12,18,and 24°C),and three LW temperature differentials (ΔT = −4,0,and +4°C) were tested...

Oil and natural gas have been the main sources of primary energy in the USA, providing 63% of the total energy consumption in 2011. Petroleum production, drilling operations, and improperly sealed abandoned wells have caused significant local groundwater contamination in many states, including at the USGS OSPER sites in Oklahoma....

The Ucross-Arvada area is part of the Powder River Basin, a large, north-trending structural depression between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on the west. Almost all of the study area is within Sheridan and Johnson Counties, Wyoming. Most of the Ucross-Arvada area lies within the...

A rapid method, quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), for quantifying indicator bacteria in recreational waters is desirable for public health protection. We report that replacing current Escherichia coli standards with new US Environmental Protection Agency beach action values (BAVs) for enterococci by culture or qPCR may result in more advisories...

Greater sage-grouse Centrocercus urophasianus (Bonaparte) currently occupy approximately half of their historical distribution across western North America. Sage-grouse are a candidate for endangered species listing due to habitat and population fragmentation coupled with inadequate regulation to control development in critical areas. Conservation planning would benefit from accurate maps delineating required...

On September 21 - 23, 2003, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) conducted an oblique aerial photographic survey along the Atlantic coast from Ocean City, Md., to Fort Caswell, N.C., and inland oblique aerial photographic survey from Waynesboro to Redwood, Va., aboard a Navajo Piper twin-engine airplane. The coastal survey...

Areas with high species richness have become focal points in the establishment of marine protected areas, but an understanding of the factors that support this diversity is still incomplete. In coastal areas, tidal currents—modulated by bathymetry and manifested in variable speeds—are a dominant physical feature of the environment. However, difficulties...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the White Bear Lake Conservation District, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and other State, county, municipal, and regional planning agencies, watershed organizations, and private organizations, conducted a study to characterize groundwater and surface-water interactions near White Bear...

1. Temperature is a major driver of ecological processes in stream ecosystems, yet the dynamics of thermal regimes remain poorly described. Most work has focused on relatively simple descriptors that fail to capture the full range of conditions that characterise thermal regimes of streams across seasons or throughout the year. 2....

The tectonically active East Sierra Valley System (ESVS), which comprises the westernmost part of the Walker Lane-Eastern California Shear Zone, marks the boundary between the highly extended Basin and Range Province and the largely coherent Sierra Nevada-Great Valley microplate (SN-GVm), which is moving relatively NW. The recent history of the...

Fire activity in the Alaskan boreal forest, though episodic at annual and intra-annual time scales, has experienced an increase over the last several decades. Increases in burned area and fire severity are not only releasing more carbon to the atmosphere, but likely shifting vegetation composition in the region towards greater...

Laser desorption ionization (LDI) coupled to Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) was used to analyze shale oils. Previous work showed that LDI is a sensitive ionization technique for assessing aromatic nitrogen compounds, and oils generated from Green River Formation oil shales are well-documented as being rich...

Wildfire affects hillslope erosion through increased surface runoff and increased sediment availability, both of which contribute to large post-fire erosion events. Relations between soil detachment rate, soil depth, flow and root properties, and fire impacts are poorly understood and not represented explicitly in commonly used post-fire erosion models. Detachment rates...

Changes in groundwater levels and salinity in six groundwater basins in Jordan were characterized by using linear trends fit to well-monitoring data collected from 1960 to early 2011. On the basis of data for 117 wells, groundwater levels in the six basins were declining, on average about -1 meter per...

Land-use change around protected areas can reduce their effective size and limit their ability to conserve biodiversity because land-use change alters ecological processes and the ability of organisms to move freely among protected areas. The goal of our analysis was to inform conservation planning efforts for a nationwide network of...

The Lower Cretaceous Fortress Mountain Formation occupies a spatial and temporal niche between syntectonic deposits at the Brooks Range orogenic front and post-tectonic strata in the Colville foreland basin. The formation includes basin-floor fan, marine-slope and fan-delta facies that define a clinoform depositional profile. Texture and composition of clasts in...

We present a comprehensive review of available crater topography measurements for Saturn’s moon Titan. In general, the depths of Titan’s craters are within the range of depths observed for similarly sized fresh craters on Ganymede, but several hundreds of meters shallower than Ganymede’s average depth vs. diameter trend. Depth-to-diameter ratios...

This study analyses observed and projected climatic trends over Ethiopia, through analysis of temperature and rainfall records and related meteorological fields. The observed datasets include gridded station records and reanalysis products; while projected trends are analysed from coupled model simulations drawn from the IPCC 4th Assessment. Upward trends in air...

Annual variation in winter severity and growing season vegetation dynamics appear to influence the demography of temperate herbivores but parsing winter from spring effects requires independent metrics of environmental conditions specific to each season. We tested for independence in annual variation amongst four common metrics used to describe winter severity...

Strontium-to-calcium ratios (Sr/Ca) were measured on the skeletal matrix of a core sample from a colony of the massive coral Siderastrea siderea collected in Coral Bay, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. Strontium and calcium are incorporated into the coral skeleton during the precipitation of aragonite by the coral polyps and...

Edwardsiella tarda, a Gram-negative member of the family Enterobacteriaceae, has been implicated in significant losses in aquaculture facilities worldwide. Here, we assessed the intra-specific variability of E. tarda isolates from 4 different fish species in the eastern United States. Repetitive sequence mediated PCR (rep-PCR) using 4 different primer sets (ERIC...

We performed complex resistivity (CR) measurements on laboratory columns to investigate changes in electrical properties as a result of varying ethanol (EtOH) concentration (0% to 30% v/v) in a sand–clay (bentonite) matrix. We applied Debye decomposition, a phenomenological model commonly used to fit CR data, to determine model parameters (time...