Application of mercury stable isotopes to examine sources and hydrologic factors impacting mercury bioaccumulation and cycling in invertebrates of a model saline lake
Samuel Francisco Lopez, Sarah E. Janssen, Michael T. Tate, Frank J. Black, Hannah Erin Mcilwain, Laura Elizabeth Flucke, Jacob M. Ogorek, William P. Johnson
2025, Water Research (284)
Invertebrates, such as brine shrimp and brine flies, are key prey items for millions of resident and migratory birds that utilize saline lakes such as Great Salt Lake (GSL). Elevated methylmercury (MeHg) in invertebrate and waterfowl species of GSL has been assumed to be linked to elevated MeHg in GSL’s...
Challenges and priorities for climate-informed invasive species management across multiple scales
A.E. Evans, L. Brewington, Carrie Jean Brown-Lima, E. Fusco, R.M. Gregg, D. Lieurance, Elliott W. Parsons, R.C. Nagy, Lindsey Thurman, Toni Lyn Morelli
2025, Conservation Science and Practice (7)
In recent decades, substantial evidence has accumulated regarding the effects of climate change on the establishment, spread, and impact of invasive species. While the importance of incorporating climate change into invasive species management and policy is increasingly recognized, practitioner experiences and perspectives are often overlooked. Consequently, invasive species research may...
Concentration dependency of PFOS bioaccumulation by freshwater benthic algae
Alison M. Zachritz, Jeffery A. Steevens, Daniele A. Miranda, Brittany G. Perrotta, Rebecca A. Dorman, Heather D. Whitehead, Erin L. Pulster, David Walters, David J. Soucek, Graham F. Peaslee, Gary A. Lamberti
2025, ACS ES&T Water (5) 4415-4422
Although perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) has been voluntarily phased out, it remains the most abundant and frequently detected PFAS compound in biota worldwide. A deeper understanding of how PFOS enters the aquatic food web at the energetic base is needed to better characterize and predict the general patterns of PFAS trophic...
Quantifying the substantive influence of public comment on United States federal environmental decisions under NEPA
Ashley Stava, Wayne E. Thogmartin, Robert Merideth, Steven Bethard, Faiz Currim, Jonathan J. Derbridge, Kirk Emerson, Egoitz Laparra, Aaron M. Lien, Emily McGovern, Justin Pidot, Marc Miller, Krista Romero-Carvenas, Blaze Smith, Carly Winnebald, Laura Lopez-Hoffman
2025, Environmental Research Letters (20)
A citizen’s right to comment on, and criticize, government decisions makes a difference. The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) institutionalized public engagement in environmental review in the belief it would lead to better decisions and more sustainable outcomes. But, 50 years later, NEPA’s public comment process has...
Crustal structure along and surrounding the Hawaiian Islands: Volcanic island construction across scarred oceanic crust
Brian Boston, Donna J. Shillington, Anthony B. Watts, Philip Cilli, Robert Dunn, Garrett Ito, Paul Wessel, Uri S. ten Brink
2025, Journal of Geophysical Research (130)
The Hawaiian Ridge is a classic example of an intraplate volcanic island chain emplaced on oceanic lithosphere. We seek to constrain both the deformation from island loading around the Hawaiian Ridge and the influence of the oceanic lithosphere, including the Molokaʻi fracture zone (MFZ), on off-axis volcanic emplacement. To examine...
First-year survival of Lake Sturgeon reintroduced to the Maumee River
Jorden R. McKenna, Justin A. Chiotti, Christopher Vandergoot, Richard Kraus, Matthew Faust, Eric Weimer, Matthew Cross, William D. Hintz
2025, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (45) 557-569
ObjectiveLake Sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens have experienced large population declines due to overfishing, habitat degradation, and pollution. Due to these factors, Lake Sturgeon were extirpated from the Maumee River watershed (Ohio, United States). In 2018, a 20-year reintroduction program began that aims to establish a self-sustaining population in the Maumee River....
Elevated CO2 enables brackish marsh transgression into freshwater forested wetlands while stimulating CH4 emissions
Luzhen Chen, Donald Schoolmaster, Ken Krauss, Camille Stagg, Nicole Cormier, Rebecca Moss, Yiyi Xiong, Nathaniel B. Weston
2025, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (323)
Wetlands are significant carbon (C) sinks and are expected to promote greater C assimilation as atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise. However, the fate of C with environmental change along fresh-to-oligohaline wetland transitions is not well understood. We established an ex-situ mesocosm experiment to mimic future elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations (eCO2, 720 ppm) versus current (380 ppm), and...
Preliminary field report of landslide hazards following Hurricane Helene
Kate E. Allstadt, Sara K. McBride, Jonathan W. Godt, Stephen L. Slaughter, Kelli Wadsworth Baxstrom, Steven Sobieszczyk, Anna Stull
2025, Open-File Report 2025-1028
Executive SummaryThis report reflects our knowledge regarding the widespread landslide activity associated with Hurricane Helene observed during the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) mission assignment to North Carolina in October 2024. The material in this report was originally prepared for the Federal Emergency Management Agency under mission assignment DR-4827-NC. The data...
Introgression, phylogeography, and genomic species cohesion in the eastern North American white oak syngameon
Gabe Ribicoff, Mira Garner, Kasey Pham, Kieren Althaus, Jeannine Cavendar-Bares, Andy Crowl, Samantha Gray, Paul F. Gugger, Marlene Hahn, S Liao, Paul Manos, Rebekah Mohn, Ian S. Pearse, Nicholas Steichmann, Ashley Tuffin, Alan T. Whittemore, Andrew Hipp
2025, Molecular Ecology (34)
Hybridization and interspecific gene flow play a substantial role in the evolution of plant taxa. The eastern North American white oak syngameon, a group of approximately 15 ecologically, morphologically and genomically distinguishable species, has long been recognised as a model system for studying introgressive hybridization in temperate trees. However, the...
Assessing uncertainty in forecasts of refugia for Joshua trees using high-density distribution data
Daniel F. Shryock, Todd Esque, Gabrielle A. Berr, Lesley A. DeFalco
2025, Ecosphere (16)
Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia and Yucca jaegeriana) are iconic, foundational species of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts in North America. Due to their ecosystem importance, long generation times, and low resilience to disturbance, these hybridizing sister species are increasingly the focus of conservation efforts. Predicting Joshua tree responses to impending climate variability,...
Population genomics of recovery and extinction in Hawaiian honeycreepers
Christopher Kyriazis, Madhvi Venkatraman, Bryce Masuda, Cynthia Steiner, Loren Cassin-Sackett, Lisa H. Crampton, Alison Flanagan, Jeffrey T. Foster, Marlys Houck, Ann Misuraca, Eben H. Paxton, Jacqueline Robinson, Robert C. Fleischer, Oliver A. Ryder, Michael G. Campana, Aryn P. Wilder
2025, Current Biology (35) 2697-2708
Native Hawaiian forest birds are experiencing an unprecedented extinction crisis. In particular, the iconic Hawaiian honeycreeper radiation has declined to just 17 out of ∼60 species remaining, most threatened with extinction due to avian malaria. Here, we investigate the genomic signatures of these declines in three honeycreeper species: the critically...
Wake Atoll: Evaluation of plant biosecurity
Corie Yanger, James D. Jacobi, Stephanie G. Yelenik, Stacie A. Hathaway
2025, Report
Introduced organisms can cause substantial effects across most landscapes. Island ecosystems, especially tropical islands, are at elevated risk from introduced organisms. The risks are even higher for tropical islands with moderate or high levels of transit, yet this can be minimized by application of appropriate biosecurity requirements. In this study,...
Outwash events inhibit vegetation recovery and prolong coastal vulnerability
Jin-Si R. Over, Christopher R. Sherwood
2025, JGR Earth Surface (130)
Overwash, when high ocean water levels and waves flood a coastline, is a common phenomenon that can lead to washover deposits and barrier rollover. Outwash, by contrast, involves seaward flow, often driven by high back-barrier water levels, and can produce washout channels and nearshore deposition. Our observations show that washout...
Waterline responses to climate forcing along the North American West Coast
Marcan Graffin, Rafael Almar, Erwin W.J. Bergsma, Julien Boucharel, Sean Vitousek, Mohsen Taherkhani, Peter Ruggiero
2025, Communications Earth & Environment (6)
Understanding waterline variability at seasonal to interannual timescales is crucial for predicting coastal responses to climate forcing. However, relationships between large-scale climate variability and coastal morphodynamics remain underexplored beyond intensively monitored sites. This study leverages a newly developed 25-year (1997–2022) satellite-derived waterline dataset along the North American West Coast. Our...
Rainfall thresholds for postfire debris-flow initiation vary with short-duration rainfall climatology
David B. Cavagnaro, Scott W. McCoy, Donald N. Lindsay, Luke A. McGuire, Jason W. Kean, Daniel T. Trugman
2025, JGR Earth Surface (130)
The size, frequency, and geographic scope of severe wildfires are expanding across the globe, including in the Western United States. Recently burned steeplands have an increased likelihood of debris flows, which pose hazards to downstream communities. The conditions for postfire debris-flow initiation are commonly expressed as rainfall intensity-duration thresholds, which...
The δ13C signature of dissolved organic and inorganic carbon reveals complex carbon transformations within a salt marsh
Meagan J. Eagle, Kevin D. Kroeger, John Pohlman, J.J. Tamborski, Z.A. Wang, Thomas W. Brooks, Jennifer A. O’Keefe Suttles, Adrian G. Mann
2025, JGR Biogeosciences (130)
Coastal wetlands have high rates of atmospheric CO2 uptake, which is subsequently respired back to the atmosphere, stored as organic matter within flooded, anoxic soils, or exported to the coastal ocean. Transformation of fixed carbon occurs through a variety of subsurface aerobic and anaerobic microbial processes, and results in a large...
Understanding the evolution of scoria cone morphology using multivariate models
Gabor Kereszturi, Pablo Grosse, Melody Whitehead, Marie-Noëlle Guilbaud, Drew T. Downs, Rina Noguchi, Matthieu Kervyn
2025, Communications Earth & Environment (6)
Scoria cones are the most abundant type of volcano in the Solar System. They occur in every tectonic setting and often overlap with human populations, yet our ability to provide complete geochronology within volcanic fields remains limited. Appropriate geochronology underpins the reconstruction of size-frequency distribution and is a key input...
Resiliency of land change monitoring efforts to input data resampling
Nathan C. Healey, Christopher Barber, Kelcy Smith, Rohan Mital, Jesslyn F. Brown, Charles Robison
2025, Frontiers in Remote Sensing (6)
The geometric transformation of remotely sensed imagery from one map projection to another necessitates a data resampling operation which alters the recorded values. The global Landsat archive is made available in the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection system which preserves geographic shape across small area but introduces small errors in...
Autumn as an overlooked opportunity for limnology
Faith R Ferrato, Sapna Sharma, Joshua A. Culpepper, Ceara J Talbot, Michael Frederick Meyer, Stephanie E. Hampton
2025, PLOS Climate (4)
Ecological disciplines, from forestry to soil sciences and ornithology, recognize the critical role of autumn in an array of physical and biological processes. Terrestrial studies categorize autumn as the end of the growing season. Autumn weather conditions can disrupt plant-soil interactions, affecting nutrient cycling and soil fertility [1]; determine dormancy...
An empirical Green’s function approach for isolating directivity effects in earthquake ground-motion amplitudes
Grace Alexandra Parker, Annemarie S. Baltay Sundstrom, Evan Tyler Hirakawa
2025, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (115) 2336-2354
In this study, we apply an empirical Green’s function (eGf) method within a ground‐motion modeling framework to mitigate trade‐offs between source, path, and site effects. Many physical processes contribute to spatial variations in observed ground motions, including earthquake radiation pattern, directivity, variable path attenuation, and site effects. Current nonergodic ground‐motion...
The first instrumentally detected hydrothermal explosion in Yellowstone National Park
Michael Poland, Alexandra M. Iezzi, Jamie Farrell, R. Greg Vaughan
2025, Geophysical Research Letters (52)
Hydrothermal explosions are one of the geological hazards most likely to impact people in Yellowstone National Park, but their frequency is poorly known. Infrasound and seismic sensors identified an explosion in Norris Geyser Basin on 15 April 2024, at 14:56 MDT (20:56 UTC)—the first instrumentally detected hydrothermal explosion in the...
A metadata checklist and data formatting guidelines to make eDNA FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable)
Miwa Takahashi, Tobias Frøslev Guldberg, Joana Pauperio, Bettina Thalinger, Katy E. Klymus, Caren C. Helbing, Cecilia Villacorta-Rath, Katherine Silliman, Luke R. Thompson, Sean Jungbluth, Suk Yee Yong, Stephen Killfoile Formel, Gareth Jenkins, Martin Laporte, Bruce Deagle, Sachit Rajbhandari, Thomas Jeppesen Stjernegaard, Andrew Bissett, Christopher L. Jerde, Erin E. Hahn, Lynn M. Schriml, Christopher Hunter, Peggy Newman, Peter Woollard, Lynsey R. Harper, Nicholas Dunn, Katrina West, Rachel Haderlé, Shaun Wilkinson, Neha Acharya-Patel, Mark Louie D. Lopez, Guy Cochrane, Oliver Berry
2025, Environmental DNA (7)
The success of environmental DNA (eDNA) approaches for species detection has revolutionized biodiversity monitoring and distribution mapping. Targeted eDNA amplification approaches, such as quantitative PCR, have improved our understanding of species distribution, and metabarcoding-based approaches have enabled biodiversity assessment at unprecedented scales and taxonomic resolution. eDNA datasets, however, are often...
Land cover change within wetland complexes at Dixie Meadows, Churchill County, Nevada: 2015 – 2023
Joshua Caster, Joel B. Sankey, Nathaniel Bransky
2025, Report
Dixie Meadows, Nevada, is a system of geothermal springs and seeps that feed a complex of marshes and wetland meadows that are located within lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Department of Defense (DOD). A previous U.S. Geological Survey report documented variability in satellite imagery-based...
Experimental drought suppresses amphibian pathogen yet intensifies transmission and disrupts protective skin microbiome
Shannon Buttimer, Daniel Medina, Renato A. Martins, Ana Gabrielle Morais da Silva, Wesley J. Neely, Célio F.B. Haddad, Graziella Vittoria DiRenzo, Alessandro Catenazzi, Rayna C. Bell, C. Guilherme Becker
2025, Global Change Biology (31)
Shifting precipitation regimes driven by global climate change can alter vertebrate behavior and host-symbiont relationships, potentially compromising host resistance to pathogen invasion. In Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a biodiversity hotspot, prior research identified drought as a key factor disrupting the skin microbiome, contributing to a die-off of pumpkin toadlets due to...
Reevaluation of an adaptive management framework for invasive Grass Carp within Lake Erie
Justin Bopp, Kelly Filer Robinson, Lucas Nathan, Seth Herbst, Travis O. Brenden, Christine M. Mayer, John M. Dettmers
2025, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (154) 490-504
ObjectiveResponse efforts to control invasive species frequently require making decisions in the face of substantial uncertainty. Adaptive management, which emphasizes learning during the process of managing, can be useful in cases where uncertainty impedes the decision-making process. Here, we describe how technical and institutional learning led to reformulating decision-making elements,...
