Exposure to ultraviolet radiation induces escape hatching of Cisco (Coregonus artedi) embryos
Nicole Lynn Berry, David Bunnell, Erin P. Overholt, Jennifer A. Schumacher, Addison Z. Almeda, Casey W. Schoenebeck, Peter C. Jacobson, Kristopher Dey, Jason B. Smith, Andrew Tucker, Thomas J. Fisher, Elizabeth M. Mette, Bradley N. Carlson, Gretchen J.A. Hansen, Tyler D. Ahrenstorff, Derek L. Bahr, Kevin Keeler, Brian Weidel, Abigail Lynch, Craig E. Williamson
2025, Freshwater Biology (70)
Cisco (Otoonapii in Ojibwe; Coregonus artedi Lesueur, 1818), is a widely distributed stenothermic freshwater fish whose embryos typically incubate under ice and in the dark. We used Cisco as a model organism for testing the potential of UV-induced escape hatching behaviour. Owing to reduced ice cover and increased water transparency in...
Assessing shifting technology in genetic monitoring of the North American plains bison Federal conservation herds
Shawna J Zimmerman, Rachael Giglio, Chris Geremia, Lee C. Jones, Blake McCann, Timothy J Smyser, Brendan J Moynahan, Sara J. Oyler-McCance
2025, Conservation Genetics (26) 657-675
Human expansion is a major driver of both declining wildlife abundance and the contraction of species’ distributions, increasing the risk of genetic erosion and the need for genetic monitoring. Rapidly advancing technology has expanded the types of genetic data that are available for wildlife conservation. However, inferences from different genetic...
The tortoise and the antilocaprid: Adapting GPS tracking and terrain data to model wildlife walking functions
Samuel Norton Chambers, Joshua W. Von Nonn, Matthew Alexander Burgess, Lance R. Brady, Jeffrey Bracewell, Daniel A. Guerra, Miguel L. Villarreal
2025, Landscape Ecology (42)
Context The relationship between slope and terrestrial animal locomotion is key to landscape ecology but underexplored across species. This is partly due to a lack of scalable methodology that applies to a diversity of wildlife. Objectives This study investigates the slope-speed relationship for two species, Texas tortoise (Gopherus berlandieri) and...
System characterization report on Resourcesat-2A Advanced Wide Field Sensor
Mahesh Shrestha, Minsu Kim, Aparajithan Sampath, Jeffrey Clauson
2025, Open-File Report 2021-1030-V
Executive Summary This report documents the system characterization of the Indian Space Research Organisation Resourcesat-2A Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) and is part of a series of system characterization reports produced by the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Cal/Val Center of Excellence. These reports describe the methodology and...
A framework tool that applies weight-of-evidence integration to the analysis of existing datasets to guide freshwater conservation
Olivia Rode, Martha E. Mather, Devon Oliver, Katherine Nelson, Victoria Reed, Trisha Moore, Suyash Pratap
2025, Frontiers in Freshwater Science (3)
The overarching issue we address here is how to extract clear and actionable ecological and management insights from real-world field data that often do not satisfy traditional statistical assumptions. Toward this goal, we developed a general 12+6 step adaptive management framework tool. We applied this framework tool...
Bridging social and ecological science to create spatially-explicit models of human-caused mortality of carnivores
Jeremy T. Bruskotter, Neil H. Carter, Richard Eugene Waggaman Berl, Joseph W. Hinton, Jazmin Murphy, L. Mark Elbroch, John A. Vucetich
2025, Ambio (54) 1479-1490
Research indicates that human-caused mortality (HCM) is a key factor limiting numerous large carnivore populations. However, efforts to represent HCM in spatially explicit models have generally been limited in scope—often relying on proxies, such as road or human density. Yet such efforts fail to distinguish different sources of HCM, which...
Integrating marine historical ecology into management of Alaska’s Pacific cod fishery for climate readiness
Catherine F. West, Loren McClenachan, Steven J. Barbeaux, Ingrid B. Spies, Jason A. Addison, Bruce T. Anderson, Courtney A. Hofman, Katherine L. Reedy, Emma A. Elliott Smith, Michael A. Etnier, Thomas E. Helser, Bruce P. Finney
2025, ICES Journal of Marine Science (82)
The Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) fishery was closed in 2020 after a rapid decline in biomass caused by the marine heat waves of 2014–2019. Pacific cod are exceptionally thermally sensitive and management of this fishery is now challenged by increasingly unpredictable climate conditions. Fisheries monitoring is critical for climate readiness,...
Comparison of two benthic assemblage sampling gears for use on intertidal oyster reefs in Louisiana
Finella M. Campanino, Stephanie K. Archer, Jillian C. Tuptiza, Cassandra N. Glaspie, Megan La Peyre
2025, Aquatic Biology (13)
Background Estuarine biodiversity plays a vital role in supporting ecosystem functions yet remains threatened by climate change and anthropogenic activity. Tracking and identifying estuarine biodiversity trends helps management ensure long-term provisions of human and environmental benefits by contributing to the estimation of habitat loss and the monitoring of restoration and...
International gas hydrate research and development
Timothy Collett
2025, Conference Paper
Gas hydrates are increasingly acknowledged as a potential future natural gas resource, sparking extensive global research into their geological characteristics and the technology needed for production. This paper offers a comprehensive review of gas hydrate-related research initiatives and production testing activities, including those in the Alaska North Slope (USA), Mackenzie...
Increased flood exposure in the Pacific Northwest following earthquake-driven subsidence and sea-level rise
Tina Dura, William Chilton, David Small, Andra Garner, Andrea D. Hawkes, Diego Melgar, Simon E. Engelhart, Lydia M. Staisch, Robert C. Witter, Alan Nelson, Harvey Kelsey, Jonathan Allan, David S. Bruce, Jessica DePaolis, Mike Priddy, Richard W. Briggs, Robert Weiss, SeanPaul La Selle, Michael J. Willis, Benjamin P. Horton
2025, PNAS (122)
Climate-driven sea-level rise is increasing the frequency of coastal flooding worldwide, exacerbated locally by factors like land subsidence from groundwater and resource extraction. However, a process rarely considered in future sea-level rise scenarios is sudden (over minutes) land subsidence associated with great (>M8) earthquakes, which can exceed 1 m. Along...
Mapping predicted ecological states at landscape scales using remote sensing data and machine learning
Nathan J. Kleist, Christopher T. Domschke, Anna C. Knight, Travis W. Nauman, Michael C. Duniway, Sarah K. Carter
2025, Ecosphere (16)
Dryland ecosystems, covering 45% of the Earth's land and supporting over one-third of the global population, face significant threats from land degradation and ecological state change. Managing these ecosystems is complex, and science-based frameworks like Ecological Site Descriptions and state-and-transition models are essential tools for guiding decisions to support ecological...
Slow rupture, long rise times, and multi-fault geometry: The 2020 M6.4 southwestern Puerto Rico mainshock
Margarita M. Solares-Colón, Dara Elyse Goldberg, Diego Melgar, Elizabeth A. Vanacore, Valerie J. Sahakian, William L. Yeck, Francisco Hernández, Alberto Lopez-Venegas
2025, Geophysical Research Letters (52)
The M6.4 mainshock of the southwestern Puerto Rico seismic sequence on 7 January 2020, was one of the most impactful modern earthquakes in the northeastern Caribbean. Due to its offshore location and complex aftershock distribution, its source kinematics remain poorly constrained. This active sequence illuminated a complex set of previously unrecognized...
Advancing broadscale spatial evapotranspiration modelling by incorporating sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence measurements
Sicong Gao, Pamela L. Nagler, William Woodgate, Alfredo Huete, Tanya M. Doody
2025, Journal of Hydrology (660)
Evapotranspiration (ET) describes the sum of water transfer from the ground surface through soil evaporation and water loss from leaf stomata into the atmosphere − critical factors linking the global water and carbon cycles. Myriad ET models based on remote sensing data provide spatially continuous estimates of ET; however, leaf...
A psychologically wise intervention to inform relational organizing in the face of climate and ocean change
Jennifer L. Waldo, Thomas C. Swearingen, Megan Siobhan Jones
2025, npj Ocean Sustainability (4)
Widespread climate action is broadly recognized as necessary to reduce climate change impacts on oceans (“ocean change”), but threats to ocean ecosystems are commonly perceived as distant, irrelevant, and unchangeable. Communicating about ocean change, therefore, requires message framing strategies targeting evidence-based psychological precursors to behavior. In a pre-registered case study...
Machine learning provides reconnaissance-type estimates of carbon dioxide storage resources in oil and gas reservoirs
E. D. Attanasi, Philip A. Freeman, Timothy C. Coburn
2025, Frontiers in Enviornmental Science (13)
Oil and gas reservoirs represent suitable containers to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) in a supercritical state because they are accessible, reservoir properties are known, and they previously contained stored buoyant fluids. However, planners must quantify the relative magnitude of the CO2 storage resource in these reservoirs to formulate a comprehensive strategy...
Bølling-Allerød productivity in the subarctic Pacific driven by seasonal upwelling
Kimberly A. deLong, Terrence Blackburn, Beth Elaine Caissie, Jason A. Addison, Zuzanna Stroynowski, Maria R. Sipala, Franco Marcantonio, Ana Christina Ravelo
2025, Geophysical Research Letters (52)
The Bølling-Allerød deglacial event is marked by high diatom productivity and opal deposition throughout the subarctic Pacific. This opal could either constitute a strengthened biological pump and thus carbon sequestration, or a weakened biological pump and release of marine-sequestered CO2 to the atmosphere. We quantify silicic acid supply at IODP Site...
Evaluation of SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection methods for wild Cervidae
Joshua Hewitt, Grete Wilson-Henjum, Jeffrey C. Chandler, Aaron T. Phillips, Diego G. Diel, W. David Walter, Alec Baker, Jennifer Høy-Petersen, Guillaume Bastille-Rousseau, Tadao Kishimoto, George Wittemyer, Jeremy Alder, Sara Hathaway, Kezia R. Manlove, Travis Gallo, Jennifer Mullinax, Carson Coriell, Matthew Payne, Meggan E. Craft, Tyler J. Garwood, Tiffany M. Wolf, Maria A. Diuk-Wasser, Meredith C. VanAcker, Laura Dudley Plimpton, Mark Q. Wilber, Daniel Grove, Justin Koseiwska, Lisa I. Muller, Kim M. Pepin
2025, Preventive Veterinary Medicine (241)
Wildlife surveillance programs often use serological data to monitor exposure to pathogens. Diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of a serological assay quantify the true positive and negative rates of the diagnostic assay, respectively. However, an assay’s accuracy can be affected by wild animals’ pathogen exposure history and quality of the sample...
Prospectivity modeling of the NASA VIPER landing site at Mons Mouton near the Lunar South Pole
Joshua Aaron Coyan, Matthew Siegler, Jose Martinez Comacho, Ross A. Beyer, Mark Shirley
2025, Planetary Science Journal (6)
We use a high-resolution digital elevation model and a numerical thermal model to produce a variety of inputs for a water-ice prospectivity model for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) landing site. These input data are maps of topography, surface slope, surface aspect, surface curvature, maximum temperature, depth to...
Broadband stochastic simulation of earthquake ground motions with multiple strong phases with an application to the 2023 Kahramanmaraş, Turkey (Türkiye), earthquake
S. M. Sajad Hussaini, Shaghayegh Karimzadeh, Sanaz Rezaeian, Paulo B. Lourenco
2025, Earthquake Spectra (41) 2399-2435
Stochastic ground motion simulation models are often less accurate at lower frequencies than at higher frequencies when fitting recorded data unless supplemented by a deterministic forward directivity velocity pulse model. Moreover, time-modulated stochastic models, which adjust ground motion amplitudes over time, typically use functions that fail to capture multiple strong-motion...
Daily survival rate and nest-site selection of Zone-tailed Hawks (Buteo albonotatus) in the Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion of Texas
Caroline Skidmore, Clint W. Boal, Ben R. Skipper, Russell Martin
2025, Journal of Raptor Research (59) 1-9
The Zone-tailed Hawk (Buteo albonotatus) is one of the least studied raptors in North America and lacks contemporary literature allowing informed management decisions for this species. Zone-tailed Hawks occupy rugged areas in the southwestern region of the United States and are listed as state threatened in Texas. Our objectives were...
Reproductive habitat mismatch influences chytrid infection dynamics in a tropical amphibian community
Neil A. Gilbert, Rayna C. Bell, Alessandro Catenazzi, Renato A. Martins, Shannon Buttimer, Wesley J. Neely, Carolina Lambertini, Veronica Saenz Calderon, Célio F.B. Haddad, C. Guilherme Becker, Graziella Vittoria DiRenzo
2025, Global Ecology and Conservation (60)
Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has been decimating amphibian populations globally; previous work indicates that infection risk increases with moisture and thermal mismatch from a host’s optimum. We hypothesized that, in addition to these abiotic influences, mismatch of hosts from their reproductive habitat heightens infection risk via exposure and/or susceptibility mechanisms. We evaluated...
Detection of landslide-generated tsunami by shipborne GNSS precise point positioning
Adam E. Manaster, Anne F Sheehan, Dara Elyse Goldberg, Katherine R. Barnhart, Ethan F. Roth
2025, Geophysical Research Letters (52)
Precise point positioning (PPP) of ships using Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data reveals the precise movements of marine vessels. This method may quantify anomalies in sea surface height with implications for oceanographic monitoring, exploration, and tsunami warning. The GNSS PPP data from the R/V Sikuliaq, a research ship of the...
Genetic structure and diversity in wild populations of the Light-footed Ridgway’s Rail reflect 20 years of augmentation through captive breeding and release
Amy G. Vandergast, Julia G. Smith, Anna Mitelberg, Dustin A. Wood, Kimberley A. Sawyer, Courtney J. Conway
2025, Open-File Report 2025-1011
Captive breeding and release programs aimed at recovery of rare species can be informed by genetic data to help select high-diversity source populations, make pairing decisions to minimize inbreeding, and manage release strategies. We developed a set of 54 microsatellite loci to assess genetic structure and diversity across the United...
Satellite imagery can predict bird species occupancy and inform multispecies management in pine savannas
Cory R. Allred, Todd M. Schneider, Elizabeth Ann Hunter
2025, Ornithological Applications
Multispecies management can contribute to meeting growing challenges of preserving biodiversity, yet current game and threatened species management often focuses on individual species. Satellite imagery available at high spatial and temporal resolution provides a potential tool to overcome the challenge posed by multispecies management of linking patterns of habitat use...
U.S. Geological Survey 2024 Rocky Mountain Region Science Exchange—Showcasing cutting-edge science to adapt to extreme weather events and stakeholder needs
William J. Andrews, Timothy N. Titus, Lauren Ellissa Eng, Kristine L. Zellman, Patrick J. Anderson, Jeremy C Havens
2025, Fact Sheet 2025-3008
IntroductionThe Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River Basin in the Western United States are complex, interconnected systems that sustain a large variety of species, including tens of millions of humans. These regions face risks from drought, wildfires, invasive plant and animal species, and habitat reduction. Working with many stakeholders, scientists...
