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Loricariid catfishes of the genus Pterygoplichthys are native to South America and have been introduced in many localities around the world. They are freshwater fishes, but may also use low-salinity habitats such as estuaries for feeding or dispersal. Here we report results of a field survey and salinity-tolerance experiments for...

Mercury (Hg) is a non-essential, toxic metal that is distributed worldwide. Mercury biomagnifies in food webs and can threaten the health of top predators such as seabirds. The Kittlitz's murrelet (Brachyramphus brevirostris) is a seabird endemic to Alaska and the Russian Far East and is a species of conservation concern...

Time series of vegetative indices derived from satellite imagery constitute tools to measure ecological effects of natural and management-induced disturbances to ecosystems. Over the past century, sagebrush-reduction treatments have been applied widely throughout western North America to increase herbaceous vegetation for livestock and wildlife....

Behavioral differences within a population can allow use of a greater range of resources among individuals. The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is a generalist omnivore that occupies diverse habitats and displays considerable plasticity in food use. We evaluated whether brown bear foraging that resulted in deviations from a...

Causal attribution of changes in water quality often consists of correlation, qualitative reasoning, listing references to the work of others, or speculation. To better support statements of attribution for water-quality trends, structural equation modeling was used to model the causal factors of total phosphorus loads in the Chesapeake Bay watershed....

Developing fast, cost-effective assessments of wild animal abundance is an important goal for many researchers, and environmental DNA (eDNA) holds much promise for this purpose. However, the quantitative relationship between species abundance and the amount of DNA present in the environment is likely to vary substantially among taxa and with...

Understanding how wide-ranging animals use landscapes in which human use is highly heterogeneous is important for determining patterns of human–wildlife conflict and designing mitigation strategies. Here, we show how biological sign surveys in forested components of a human-dominated landscape can be combined with human interviews in agricultural portions of a...

The hydrological simulation program Fortran (HSPF) [Hydrological Simulation Program Fortran version 12.2 (Computer software). USEPA, Washington, DC] and the precipitation runoff modeling system (PRMS) [Precipitation Runoff Modeling System version 4.0 (Computer software). USGS, Reston, VA] models are semidistributed, deterministic hydrological tools for simulating the impacts of precipitation, land use,...

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated mean undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous resources of 2.0 billion barrels of oil and 20.3 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Bohaiwan Basin Province, China....

AimEcological restoration is critical for recovering biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet designing interventions to achieve particular outcomes remains fraught with challenges. In the extensive regions where non-native species are firmly established, it is unlikely that historical conditions can be fully reinstated. To what degree, and how rapidly,...

Expanding human population and urbanization alters freshwater systems through structural changes to habitat, temperature effects from increased runoff and reduced canopy cover, altered flows, and increased toxicants. Current stream assessments stop short of measuring health or condition of species utilizing these freshwater habitats and fail to link specific stressors mechanistically...

The acidity of many streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM) has increased significantly since pre-industrial (∼1850) times due to the effects of highly acidic atmospheric deposition in poorly buffered watersheds. Extensive stream-monitoring programs since 1993 have shown that fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages have been adversely affected in...

The accumulation of magmatic CO2 beneath low-permeability barriers may lead to the formation of CO2-rich gas reservoirs within volcanic systems. Such accumulation is often evidenced by high surface CO2 emissions that fluctuate over time. The temporal variability in surface degassing is believed in part to reflect a complex interplay between deep magmatic...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management, conducted a study to assess the water resources and potential effects on the water resources from oil and gas development in the Tri-County planning area, Sierra, Doña Ana, and Otero Counties, New Mexico. Publicly available data were...

Quantifying change in urban land provides important information to create empirical models examining the effects of human land use. Maps of developed land from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of the conterminous United States include rural roads in the developed land class and therefore overestimate the amount of urban...

Volcanic ash is a heterogeneous mineral dust that is typically composed of a mixture of amorphous (glass) and crystalline (mineral) fragments. It commonly contains an abundance of the crystalline silica (SiO2) polymorph cristobalite. Inhalation of crystalline silica can induce inflammation by stimulating the NLRP3 inflammasome, a cytosolic receptor complex that...

This research was initiated in conjunction with a systematic, multiagency surveillance effort in the United States (U.S.) in response to reported findings of infectious salmon anaemia virus (ISAV) RNA in British Columbia, Canada. In the systematic surveillance study reported in a companion paper, tissues from various salmonids taken from Washington...

Understanding the complex influences of landscape and anthropogenic elements that shape the population genetic structure of invasive species provides insight into patterns of colonization and spread. The application of landscape genomics techniques to these questions may offer detailed, previously undocumented insights into factors influencing species invasions. We investigated the spatial...

The tectonics of the Sunda arc region is characterized by the junction of the Eurasian and Indo‐Australian tectonic plates, causing complex dynamics to take place. High‐seismicity rates in the Indonesian region occur due to the interaction between these tectonic plates. The availability of a denser network of seismometers after the...

An increased societal focus on wildlife as food and recent policy deliberations regarding legal markets for wild-harvested meat are encouraging wildlife managers and researchers to examine the amount, use, and distribution of meat yielded through recreational hunting. We used responses to questions on the Michigan Deer Harvest Study to estimate...

To better characterize the transport of neonicotinoid insecticides to the world's largest freshwater ecosystem, monthly samples (October 2015–September 2016) were collected from 10 major tributaries to the Great Lakes, USA. For the monthly tributary samples, neonicotinoids were detected in every month sampled and five of the six target neonicotinoids were...

Logistic regression models—or “sightability models”—fit to detection/non-detection data from marked individuals are often used to adjust for visibility bias in later detection-only surveys, with population abundance estimated using a modified Horvitz-Thompson (mHT) estimator. More recently, a model-based alternative for analyzing combined detection/non-detection and detection-only data was developed. This approach seemed...

While airborne lidar data have revolutionized the spatial resolution that elevations can be realized, data limitations are often magnified in coastal settings. Researchers have found that airborne lidar can have a vertical error as high as 60 cm in densely vegetated intertidal areas. The uncertainty of digital elevation models is...

Global-scale studies suggest that dryland ecosystems dominate an increasing trend in the magnitude and interannual variability of the land CO2 sink. However, such model-based analyses are poorly constrained by measured CO2 exchange in open shrublands, which is the most common global land cover type, covering ∼14% of Earth’s surface. Here we evaluate...

AimClimate warming is causing extensive loss of glaciers in mountainous regions, yet our understanding of how glacial recession influences evolutionary processes and genetic diversity is limited. Linking genetic structure with the influences shaping it can improve understanding of how species respond to environmental change. Here, we used genome-scale data and...