Results of hydrologic monitoring on landslide-prone coastal bluffs near Mukilteo, Washington
Joel B. Smith, Rex L. Baum, Benjamin B. Mirus, Abigail R. Michel, Ben Stark
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1095
A hydrologic monitoring network was installed to investigate landslide hazards affecting the railway corridor along the eastern shore of Puget Sound between Seattle and Everett, near Mukilteo, Washington. During the summer of 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey installed monitoring equipment at four sites equipped with instrumentation to measure rainfall and...
Increasing rock-avalanche size and mobility in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska detected from 1984 to 2016 Landsat imagery
Jeffrey A. Coe, Erin Bessette-Kirton, M. Geertsema
2017, Landslides (15) 393-407
In the USA, climate change is expected to have an adverse impact on slope stability in Alaska. However, to date, there has been limited work done in Alaska to assess if changes in slope stability are occurring. To address this issue, we used 30-m Landsat imagery acquired from 1984 to...
Late Quaternary environmental dynamics in the Atacama Desert reconstructed from rodent midden pollen records
M.E. de Porras, A. Maldonado, R. De Pol-Holz, C. Latorre, Julio L. Betancourt
2017, Journal of Quaternary Science (32) 665-684
In the past two decades, much has been learned about the late Quaternary climate history of the Atacama Desert with some details still unclear about the seasonality, timing and extent of wet and dry phases. Modern climate studies reveal that, far from exhibiting a unique pattern, seasonal precipitation originates from...
Extension of the analytical window for characterizing aromatic compounds in oils using a comprehensive suite of high-resolution mass spectrometry techniques and double bond equivalence versus carbon number plot
Yunju Cho, Justin E. Birdwell, Manhoi Hur, Joonhee Lee, Byungjoo Kim, Sunghwan Kim
2017, Energy & Fuels (31) 7874-7883
In this study, comprehensive two-dimensional (2D) gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), atmospheric pressure photoionization (APPI) quadrupole-Orbitrap mass spectrometry (MS), and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) were used to study the aromatic fractions of crude oil and oil shale pyrolysates (shale oils). The collected data were compared and...
Lessons from the Tōhoku tsunami: A model for island avifauna conservation prioritization
Michelle H. Reynolds, Paul Berkowitz, John Klavitter, Karen Courtot
2017, Ecology and Evolution (7) 5873-5890
Earthquake-generated tsunamis threaten coastal areas and low-lying islands with sudden flooding. Although human hazards and infrastructure damage have been well documented for tsunamis in recent decades, the effects on wildlife communities rarely have been quantified. We describe a tsunami that hit the world's largest remaining tropical seabird rookery and estimate...
Long-term dynamics and characteristics of snags created for wildlife habitat
Amy M. Barry, Joan Hagar, James W. Rivers
2017, Forest Ecology and Management (403) 145-151
Snags provide essential habitat for numerous organisms and are therefore critical to the long-term maintenance of forest biodiversity. Resource managers often use snag creation to mitigate the purposeful removal of snags at the time of harvest, but information regarding how created snags change over long timescales (>20 y) is absent from...
Hydrologic regimes as potential drivers of morphologic divergence in fish
Lindsey Bruckerhoff, Daniel D. Magoulick
2017, Evolutionary Ecology (31) 517-531
Fishes often exhibit phenotypic divergence across gradients of abiotic and biotic selective pressures. In streams, many of the known selective pressures driving phenotypic differentiation are largely influenced by hydrologic regimes. Because flow regimes drive so many attributes of lotic systems, we hypothesized fish exhibit phenotypic divergence among streams with different...
Biological and ecological science for Florida—The Sunshine State
Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey
2017, Fact Sheet 2017-3066
Florida is rich in sunshine and other natural resources essential to the State's economy. More than 100 million tourists visit Florida's beaches, wetlands, forests, oceans, lakes, and streams where they generate billions of dollars and sustain more than a million jobs. Florida also provides habitat for several thousand freshwater and...
Logistic quantile regression provides improved estimates for bounded avian counts: A case study of California Spotted Owl fledgling production
Brian S. Cade, Barry R. Noon, Rick D. Scherer, John J. Keane
2017, The Auk (134) 783-801
Counts of avian fledglings, nestlings, or clutch size that are bounded below by zero and above by some small integer form a discrete random variable distribution that is not approximated well by conventional parametric count distributions such as the Poisson or negative binomial. We developed a logistic quantile regression model...
Simultaneous estimation of diet composition and calibration coefficients with fatty acid signature data
Jeffrey F. Bromaghin, Suzanne M. Budge, Gregory W. Thiemann, Karyn D. Rode
2017, Ecology and Evolution (7) 6103-6113
Knowledge of animal diets provides essential insights into their life history and ecology, although diet estimation is challenging and remains an active area of research. Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) has become a popular method of estimating diet composition, especially for marine species. A primary assumption of QFASA is...
Trophic structure of mesopelagic fishes in the Gulf of Mexico revealed by gut content and stable isotope analyses
Jennifer P. McClain-Counts, Amanda W.J. Demopoulos, Steve W. Ross
2017, Marine Ecology (38)
Mesopelagic fishes represent an important component of the marine food web due to their global distributions, high abundances and ability to transport organic material throughout a large part of the water column. This study combined stable isotope (SIAs) and gut content analyses (GCAs) to characterize the trophic structure of mesopelagic...
Prediction of forest canopy and surface fuels from Lidar and satellite time series data in a bark beetle-affected forest
Benjamin C. Bright, Andrew T. Hudak, Arjan J.H. Meddens, Todd Hawbaker, Jenny S. Briggs, Robert E. Kennedy
2017, Forests (9) 1-22
Wildfire behavior depends on the type, quantity, and condition of fuels, and the effect that bark beetle outbreaks have on fuels is a topic of current research and debate. Remote sensing can provide estimates of fuels across landscapes, although few studies have estimated surface fuels from remote sensing data. Here...
Monitoring the southwestern Wyoming landscape—A foundation for management and science
Daniel J. Manier, Patrick J. Anderson, Timothy J. Assal, Geneva W. Chong, Cynthia P. Melcher
2017, Fact Sheet 2017-3030
Natural resource monitoring involves repeated collections of resource condition data and analyses to detect possible changes and identify underlying causes of changes. For natural resource agencies, monitoring provides the foundation for management and science. Specifically, analyses of monitoring data allow managers to better understand effects of land-use and other changes...
Water resources of Parowan Valley, Iron County, Utah
Thomas M. Marston
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5033
Parowan Valley, in Iron County, Utah, covers about 160 square miles west of the Red Cliffs and includes the towns of Parowan, Paragonah, and Summit. The valley is a structural depression formed by northwest-trending faults and is, essentially, a closed surface-water basin although a small part of the valley at...
Salish Kootenai College and U.S. Geological Survey partnership—Enhancing student opportunities and professional development
Roy Sando, Monique Fordham
2017, Fact Sheet 2017-3065
Salish Kootenai College (SKC), in the Flathead Reservation in the northwestern corner of Montana, is the largest of the seven Tribal colleges in the State. In 2011, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Tribal Liaison Monique Fordham from the Office of Tribal Relations/Office of Science Quality and Integrity began discussions with...
Aftershocks driven by afterslip and fluid pressure sweeping through a fault-fracture mesh
Zachary E. Ross, Christopher Rollins, Elizabeth S. Cochran, Egill Hauksson, Jean-Philippe Avouac, Yehuda Ben-Zion
2017, Geophysical Research Letters (44) 8260-8267
A variety of physical mechanisms are thought to be responsible for the triggering and spatiotemporal evolution of aftershocks. Here we analyze a vigorous aftershock sequence and postseismic geodetic strain that occurred in the Yuha Desert following the 2010 Mw 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake. About 155,000 detected aftershocks occurred in a network of...
A large-scale environmental flow experiment for riparian restoration in the Colorado River delta
Patrick B. Shafroth, Karen Schlatter, Martha Gomez-Sapiens, Erick Lundgren, Matthew R. Grabau, Jorge Ramirez-Hernandez, J. Eliana Rodriguez-Burgeueno, Karl W. Flessa
2017, Ecological Engineering (106) 645-660
Managing streamflow is a widely-advocated approach to provide conditions necessary for seed germination and seedling establishment of trees in the willow family (Salicaceae). Experimental flow releases to the Colorado River delta in 2014 had a primary objective of promoting seedling establishment of Fremont cottonwood (Populus fremontii) and Goodding's willow (Salix...
Integrating active restoration with environmental flows to improve native riparian tree establishment in the Colorado River Delta
Karen Schlatter, Matthew R. Grabau, Patrick B. Shafroth, Francisco Zamora-Arroyo
2017, Ecological Engineering (106) 661-674
Drastic alterations to river hydrology, land use change, and the spread of the nonnative shrub, tamarisk (Tamarix spp.), have led to the degradation of riparian habitat in the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. Delivery of environmental flows to promote native cottonwood (Populus spp.) and willow (Salix spp.) recruitment in human-impacted...
Simulated effects of YY-male stocking and manual suppression for eradicating nonnative Brook Trout populations
Daniel J. Schill, Kevin A. Meyer, Michael J. Hansen
2017, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (37) 1054-1066
Eradication of nonnative Brook Trout Salvelinus fontinalis populations is difficult to achieve with standard techniques, such as electrofishing removal or piscicides; new approaches are needed. A novel concept is to stock “supermale” hatchery fish with wild conspecifics. Supermales (MYY) have two Y-chromosomes, resulting in offspring that are all males; over time, successful...
Predicting redox-sensitive contaminant concentrations in groundwater using random forest classification
Anthony J. Tesoriero, Jo Ann M. Gronberg, Paul F. Juckem, Matthew P. Miller, Brian P. Austin
2017, Water Resources Research (53) 7316-7331
Machine learning techniques were applied to a large (n > 10,000) compliance monitoring database to predict the occurrence of several redox-active constituents in groundwater across a large watershed. Specifically, random forest classification was used to determine the probabilities of detecting elevated concentrations of nitrate, iron, and arsenic in the Fox, Wolf, Peshtigo,...
Groundwater discharge by evapotranspiration, flow of water in unsaturated soil, and stable isotope water sourcing in areas of sparse vegetation, Amargosa Desert, Nye County, Nevada
Michael T. Moreo, Brian J. Andraski, C. Amanda Garcia
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5079
This report documents methodology and results of a study to evaluate groundwater discharge by evapotranspiration (GWET) in sparsely vegetated areas of Amargosa Desert and improve understanding of hydrologic-continuum processes controlling groundwater discharge. Evapotranspiration and GWET rates were computed and characterized at three sites over 2 years using a combination...
Predictive framework for estimating exposure of birds to pharmaceuticals
Thomas G. Bean, Kathryn E. Arnold, Julie M. Lane, Ed Bergstrom, Jane Thomas-Oates, Barnett A. Rattner, Allistair B.A. Boxall
2017, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (36) 2335-2344
We present and evaluate a framework for estimating concentrations of pharmaceuticals over time in wildlife feeding at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The framework is composed of a series of predictive steps involving the estimation of pharmaceutical concentration in wastewater, accumulation into wildlife food items, and uptake by wildlife with subsequent...
Effects of environmental covariates and density on the catchability of fish populations and interpretation of catch per unit effort trends
Josh Korman, Michael D. Yard
2017, Fisheries Research (189) 18-34
Article for outlet: Fisheries Research. Abstract: Quantifying temporal and spatial trends in abundance or relative abundance is required to evaluate effects of harvest and changes in habitat for exploited and endangered fish populations. In many cases, the proportion of the population or stock that is captured (catchability or capture probability)...
Modern landscape processes affecting archaeological sites along the Colorado River corridor downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona
Amy E. East, Joel B. Sankey, Helen C. Fairley, Joshua J. Caster, Alan Kasprak
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5082
The landscape of the Colorado River through Glen Canyon National Recreation Area formed over many thousands of years and was modified substantially after the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963. Changes to river flow, sediment supply, channel base level, lateral extent of sedimentary terraces, and vegetation in the post-dam...
Habitat use by juvenile salmonids in Lake Ontario tributaries-species, age, diel and seasonal effects
James H. Johnson, James E. McKenna Jr.
2017, Journal of Great Lakes Research (43) 963-969
Understanding the habitat needs of fish and how these requirements may change seasonally over a 24-h period is important, especially for highly managed sport species. Consequently, we examined the diel and seasonal habitat use of four juvenile salmonid species in streams in the Lake Ontario watershed. For juvenile Atlantic salmon Salmo...
