Removal of chronic Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae carrier ewes eliminates pneumonia in a bighorn sheep population
Tyler Garwood, Chadwick P. Lehman, Daniel P. Walsh, E. Frances Cassirer, Thomas E. Besser, Jonathan A. Jenks
2020, Ecology and Evolution (10) 3491-3502
Chronic pathogen carriage is one mechanism that allows diseases to persist in populations. We hypothesized that persistent or recurrent pneumonia in bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis ) populations may be caused by chronic carriers of Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae (Mo ). Our experimental approach allowed us to address a conservation need while investigating the role of...
Monitoring nearshore ecosystem health using Pacific razor clams (Siliqua patula) as an indicator species
Lizabeth Bowen, Katrina Counihan, Brenda E. Ballachey, Heather A Colletti, Tuula E. Hollmen, Benjamin Pister, Tammy L Wilson
2020, PeerJ (8)
An emerging approach to ecosystem monitoring involves the use of physiological biomarker analyses in combination with gene transcription assays. For the first time, we employed these tools to evaluate the Pacific razor clam (Siliqua patula), which is important both economically and ecologically, as a bioindicator species in the northeast Pacific....
Groundwater characterization and effects of pumping in the Death Valley regional groundwater flow system, Nevada and California, with special reference to Devils Hole
Keith J. Halford, Tracie R. Jackson
2020, Professional Paper 1863
Groundwater flow and development were characterized in four groundwater basins of the Death Valley regional flow system in Nevada and California with calibrated, groundwater-flow models. Natural groundwater discharges in the Furnace Creek, Lower Amargosa, and Saratoga Spring areas were defined and distributed consistently with a revised hydrogeologic...
Biogeography of fire regimes in western US conifer forests: A trait-based approach
Jens Stevens, Matthew M. Kling, Dylan W. Schwilk, J. Morgan Varner, Jeffrey M. Kane
2020, Global Ecology and Biogeography (29) 944-955
Aim Functional traits are a critical link between species distributions and the ecosystem processes that structure those species’ niches. Concurrent increases in the availability of functional trait data and our ability to model species distributions present an opportunity to develop functional trait biogeography, i.e. the mapping of functional traits across space....
Fundamental hydraulics of cross sections in natural rivers: Preliminary analysis of a large data set of acoustic doppler flow measurements
David M. Bjerklie, John W, Fulton, S. Lawrence Dingman, Michael G. Canova, J. Toby Minear, Tommaso Moramarco
2020, Water Resource Research (56)
We have assembled a comprehensive and publicly accessible U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) streamflow measurement data set, called HYDRoSWOT, from a USGS National Water Information System archive of acoustic Doppler current profiler river discharge measurements collected from a wide range of rivers throughout the United States. The data...
Climate dipoles as continental drivers of plant and animal populations
Benjamin Zuckerberg, Courtenay Strong, Jalene LaMontagne, Scott St. George, Julio L. Betancourt, Walter D. Koenig
2020, Trends in Ecology and Evolution (35) 440-453
Ecological processes, such as migration and phenology, are strongly influenced by climate variability. Studying these processes often relies on associating observations of animals and plants with climate variability indices, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. A characteristic of climate indices is the simultaneous emergence of opposite extremes of temperature and...
Causal effect of impervious cover on annual flood magnitude for the United States
Annalise G. Blum, Paul J. Ferraro, Stacey A. Archfield, Karen R. Ryberg
2020, Geophysical Research Letters (47)
Despite consensus that impervious surfaces increase flooding, the magnitude of the increase remains uncertain. This uncertainty largely stems from the challenge of isolating the effect of changes in impervious cover separate from other factors that also affect flooding. To control for these factors, prior study designs...
Digging into the geologic record of environmentally driven changes in coral-reef development
Philip M. Gravinese, Richard B. Aronson, Lauren Toth
2020, Oceanography (1) 85-91
This lesson uses data based on real-world geological archives to guide students toward understanding how climate and oceanography have impacted coral-reef growth over the last 5000 years. The objective of the lesson is for students to determine the relationship between environmental variability and coral-reef development over millennial timescales. In this...
An uncertain future for a population of desert tortoises experiencing human impacts
Kristin H. Berry, Julie L. Yee, Lisa L. Lyren, Jeremy S Mack
2020, Herpetologica (76) 1-11
We evaluated the status of a population of Mojave Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizii), a threatened species, in the El Paso Mountains of the northwestern Mojave Desert in California, USA. The study area lies north of and adjacent to a designated critical habitat unit for the species, is adjacent to a...
Estimates of water use associated with continuous oil and gas development in the Williston Basin, North Dakota and Montana, 2007–17
Ryan R. McShane, Theodore B. Barnhart, Joshua F. Valder, Seth S. Haines, Kathleen M. Macek-Rowland, Janet M. Carter, Gregory C. Delzer, Joanna N. Thamke
2020, Scientific Investigations Report 2020-5012
This study of water use associated with development of continuous oil and gas resources in the Williston Basin is intended to provide a preliminary model-based analysis of water use in major regions of production of continuous oil and gas resources in the United States. Direct, indirect, and ancillary water use...
Identifying life history traits that promote occurrence for four minnow (Leuciscidae) species in intermittent Gulf Coastal Plain streams
Jessica L. Davis, Mary Freeman, Stephen W. Golladay
2020, Southeastern Naturalist (19) 103-127
- Life history traits of stream fishes partly reflect adaptations to disturbance regimes, which in turn shape assemblage composition via environmental filters. In this study, we focused on life history traits of four morphologically similar leuciscid species in coastal plain streams of southwestern GA that are shifting from historically perennial...
The changing sociocultural context of wildlife conservation
Michael J. Manfredo, Tara L. Teel, Andrew W. Don Carlos, Leeann Sullivan, Alan D. Bright, Alia M. Dietsch, Jeremy Bruskotter, David C. Fulton
2020, Conservation Biology (34) 1549-1559
We introduced a multilevel model of value shift to describe the changing social context of wildlife conservation. Our model depicts how cultural-level processes driven by modernization (e.g., increased wealth, education, and urbanization) affect changes in individual-level cognition that prompt a shift from domination to mutualism wildlife...
Operational earthquake forecasting during the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, earthquake sequence with the UCERF3-ETAS model
Kevin R. Milner, Edward H. Field, William H Savran, Morgan T. Page, Thomas H Jordan
2020, Seismological Research Letters (91) 1567-1578
The first Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, Version 3–epidemic‐type aftershock sequence (UCERF3‐ETAS) aftershock simulations were running on a high‐performance computing cluster within 33 min of the 4 July 2019 M 6.4 Searles Valley earthquake. UCERF3‐ETAS, an extension of the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF3), is the first comprehensive,...
Mapping fire regime ecoregions in California
Alexandra D. Syphard, Jon Keeley
2020, International Journal of Wildland Fire (29) 595-601
The fire regime is a central framing concept in wildfire science and ecology and describes how a range of wildfire characteristics vary geographically over time. Understanding and mapping fire regimes is important for guiding appropriate management and risk reduction strategies and for informing research on drivers of global...
Changing suspended sediment in United States rivers and streams: Linking sediment trends to changes in land use/cover, hydrology and climate
Jennifer C. Murphy
2020, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (24) 991-1010
Sediment is one of the leading pollutants in rivers and streams across the United States (US) and the world. Between 1992 and 2012, concentrations of annual mean suspended sediment decreased at over half of the 137 stream sites assessed across the contiguous US. Increases occurred at less than 25 % of...
Climate change: Flowering time may be shifting in surprising ways
Janet S. Prevey
2020, Current Biology (30) R112-R114
Climate change is known to affect regional weather patterns and phenology; however, we lack under-standing of how climate drives phenological change across local spatial gradients. This spatial variation is critical for determining whether subpopulations and metacommunities are changing in unison or diverging in phenology. Divergent responses could reduce synchrony both...
Conterminous United States land cover change patterns 2001–2016 from the 2016 National Land Cover Database
Collin G. Homer, Jon Dewitz, Suming Jin, George Z. Xian, Catherine Costello, Patrick Danielson, Leila Gass, Michelle Funk, James Wickham, Steven Stehman, Roger F. Auch, Kurt H. Riitters
2020, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (162) 184-199
The 2016 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) product suite (available on www.mrlc.gov), includes Landsat-based, 30 m resolution products over the conterminous (CONUS) United States (U.S.) for land cover, urban imperviousness, and tree, shrub, herbaceous and bare ground fractional percentages. The release of NLCD 2016 provides important new information on land...
Legacy and current‐use contaminants in sediments alter macroinvertebrate communities in southeastern US Streams
Patrick W. Moran, Nile E. Kemble, Ian R. Waite, Barbara Mahler, Lisa H. Nowell, Peter C. Van Metre
2020, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (39) 1219-1232
Sediment contamination of freshwater streams in urban areas is a recognized and growing concern. As a part of a comprehensive regional stream‐quality assessment, stream‐bed sediment was sampled from streams spanning a gradient of urban intensity in the Piedmont ecoregion of the southeastern United States. We evaluated...
Sea turtle conservation: Priorities for environmental education efforts
Jessica E. Swindall, Holly K. Ober, Margaret Lamont, Raymond R. Carthy
2020, EDIS (2)
All five species of sea turtle that occur in Florida are in danger of extinction. Many of the reasons these turtles are declining are a result of people’s actions on beaches and in shallow waters. Environmental education is needed to increase awareness and appreciation for sea turtles, and to teach...
Estimating population persistence for at-risk species using citizen science data
B.A. Crawford, M. Olds, J.C. Maerz, Clinton T. Moore
2020, Biological Conservation (243)
Population persistence probability is valuable for characterizing risk to species and informing listing and conservation decisions but is challenging to estimate through traditional methods for rare, data-limited species. Modeling approaches have used citizen science data to mitigate data limitations of focal species and better...
Niche partitioning among native ciscoes and nonnative Rainbow Smelt in Lake Superior
Caroline Lynn Rosinski, Mark Vinson, Daniel L. Yule
2020, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (149) 184-203
Several species of ciscoes Coregonus, subgenus Leucichthys that are native to the Laurentian Great Lakes are rare or extirpated. The restoration of Coregonus fishes is being actively pursued through stocking, and success may depend on the availability of unoccupied niche space. We described the spring–summer habitat occupancy and diets of three native cisco species (Bloater Coregonus...
Mercury export from Arctic great rivers
Scott Zolkos, David P. Krabbenhoft, Anya Suslova, Suzanne E. Tank, James W. McClelland, Robert G. M. Spencer, Alexander Shiklomanov, Alexander V. Zhulidov, Tatiana Gurtovaya, Nikita Zimov, Sergey Zimov, Edda A. Mutter, Les Kutny, Edwin Amos, Robert M. Holmes
2020, Environmental Science & Technology (54) 4140-4148
Land–ocean linkages are strong across the circumpolar north, where the Arctic Ocean accounts for 1% of the global ocean volume and receives more than 10% of the global river discharge. Yet estimates of Arctic riverine mercury (Hg) export constrained from direct Hg measurements remain sparse. Here, we report results from...
Gas hydrate petroleum systems: What constitutes the “seal”?
Junbong Jang, William F. Waite, Laura A. Stern
2020, Interpretation (8) T231-T248
The gas hydrate petroleum system (GHPS) approach, which has been used to characterize gas hydrates in nature, utilizes three distinct components: a methane source, a methane migration pathway, and a reservoir that not only contains gas hydrate, but also acts as a seal to prevent methane loss. Unlike GHPS, a...
Testing glacial isostatic adjustment models of last-interglacial sea level history in the Bahamas and Bermuda
Daniel R. Muhs, Kathleen R. Simmons, R. Randall Schumann, Eugene S. Schweig III, Mark P. Rowe
2020, Quaternary Science Reviews (233)
Part of the spatial variation in the apparent sea-level record of the last interglacial (LIG) period is due to the diverse response of coastlines to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) processes, particularly where coastlines were close to the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the past two glacial periods. We tested modeled LIG...
Wind River subbasin restoration: Annual report of US..Geological Survey activities, January 2018 through December 2018
Ian G. Jezorek
2020, Report
We sampled juvenile wild Steelhead Oncorhynchus mykiss in headwater streams of the Wind River, WA, to characterize populations and investigate life-history metrics, particularly migratory patterns. We used Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT)-tagging and a series of instream PIT-tag interrogation systems (PTISs) to track juveniles. The Wind River subbasin is considered a...
