Causal analysis of fire regime drivers in California
Jon Keeley, Alexandra D. Syphard
2025, International Journal of Wildland Fire (34)
BackgroundUnderstanding the relative contribution of climate and human factors to wildfires is critical for managing risk across California’s diverse ecosystems, in the United States (US).AimsWe propose a model that distinguishes between proximate and ultimate drivers of fire regimes and apply it to a century of fire and climate...
Geochemical and hydrological investigations of historical data collected at the Lee Acres Landfill and Giant Bloomfield Refinery, New Mexico, 1985–2020
Erin L. Gray, Christina L. Ferguson
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2025-5091
The Lee Acres Landfill and Giant Bloomfield Refinery are adjacent properties near the City of Farmington, New Mexico, each having undergone monitoring and remediation related to historical site activities. At the landfill, site cleanup has included the installation of a capillary barrier over former liquid waste lagoons and periodic monitoring...
Biologging to identify nesting and non-nesting emergences for four species of imperiled sea turtles
Kristen Hart, Connor F. White, Donna J. Shaver, Margaret Lamont, Michael Cherkiss, Andrew G. Crowder, Nicholas M. Whitney
2025, Frontiers in Marine Science (12)
Quantifying sea turtle nesting behavior is essential for recovery planning and evaluating management actions. Traditional monitoring approaches, based on nest counts from beach surveys, can misclassify non-nesting emergences, obscure true fecundity, and underestimate clutch frequency, metrics that directly influence population models and regulatory decisions. Here, we demonstrate...
Exploring atmospheric deposition chemistry data across the United States
Ryan C. McCammon, Noel A. Deyette, Gregory A. Wetherbee
2025, Fact Sheet 2025-3041
The National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP) collects atmospheric data to monitor air pollution effects on the quality of United States water supplies and ecosystems. The NADP requires consistent data collection at fixed locations and is governed by a committee with participation by many Federal and State agencies, universities, Tribes, and private companies. NADP conducts a spring...
A summary of grizzly bear distribution in the lower-48 US states in 2024
Cecily M. Costello, Justin A. Dellinger, Jennifer K. Fortin-Noreus, Mark Haroldson, Bryn Karabensh, Wayne F. Kasworm, Lori L. Roberts, Justin E. Teisberg, Frank T. van Manen, Tyler J. Vent
2025, Report
Understanding the distribution of grizzly bear populations in the lower-48 states, is important for their conservation and management, and for public safety. Previously, our research teams working in grizzly bear ecosystems in the lower-48 states used varying methods to estimate distribution of grizzly bear populations. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem...
Wetland hydrologic dynamics and duck productivity are declining in the Prairie Pothole Region, and they are linked
Michael J. Anteau, Michael L Szymanski, Aaron T. Pearse
2025, Environmental and Sustainability Indicators (29)
The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America is a globally important area hosting >50 % of North America’s breeding ducks. Ducks in the PPR depend on wetlands and grasslands which have experienced accelerated losses in extent and quality due to agriculture. While other bird populations have declined,...
Estimates of global surface water dynamics harnessing near real-time land cover observations and open science geospatial capabilities
Arushi Khare, Bikas C. Gupta, Adnan Rajib, Melanie K. Vanderhoof, Qiusheng Wu
2025, Environmental Research Letters (20)
Spatio-temporal changes to our world’s surface water resources are escalating. Translating how these changes impact communities and ecosystems requires time-varying data of Global Surface Water Extents (GSWE). Traditionally, GSWE mapping has been limited to static estimates, with recent efforts focusing on annual averages, frequency and occurrence of...
Toward co-designed Earth System Models: Reflecting end-user priorities in local applications from a modeler's perspective
Yifan Cheng, Nicole M. Herman-Mercer, Andrew J. Newman, Keith Musselman, Cleo Woelfle-Hazard, Dylan Blaskey, Cassandra M. Brooks, Tvetene Carlson, Joshua C. Koch, Monica Morrison, Edda A. Mutter, Daniel Sarna-Wojcicki, Peyton Thomas, Jenessa Tlen, Ryan C. Toohey
2025, AGU Advances (6)
Earth System Models (ESM) are crucial for quantifying climate impacts across Earth's interconnected systems and supporting science-based adaptation and mitigation. However, not including end-users, especially decision-makers representing communities vulnerable to climate change, can limit model utility, increase epistemic risks, and lead to information misuse in decision-making. While the...
Power source, data retrieval method, and attachment type affect success of dorsally mounted tracking tag deployments in 37 species of shorebirds
Emily L. Weiser, Richard Lanctot, Daniel R. Ruthrauff, Sarah T. Saalfeld, Lee Tibbitts, José Abad-Gómez, Joaquín Aldabe, Juliana Bose de Almeida, José A. Alves, Guy Anderson, Phil F. Battley, Heinrich Belting, Joël Bêty, Kristin Bianchini, Mary Anne Bishop, Roeland A. Bom, Katharine Bowgen, Glen S. Brown, Stephen C. Brown, Leandro Bugoni, Niall Burton, David R. Bybee, Camilo Carneiro, Gabriel Castresana, Ying-Chi Chan, Chi-Yeung Choi, Katherine Christie, Nigel A. Clark, Jesse R. Conklin, Medardo Cruz-López, Stephen J. Dinsmore, Steve Dodd, David C. Douglas, Luke Eberhart-Hertel, Willow B. English, Harry Ewing, Fernando A. Faria, Samantha E. Franks, Richard A. Fuller, Robert E. Gill Jr., Marie-Andrée Giroux, Cheri L Gratto-Trevor, David Green, Rhys E. Green, Ros Green, Tómas Gunnarsson, Jorge S. Gutiérrez, Autumn-Lynn Harrison, C. Alex Hartman, Chris J. Hassell, Sarah Hoepfner, Jos C. E. W. Hooijmeijer, James Johnson, Oscar W. Johnson, Bart Kempenaers, Marcel Klaassen, Eva Kok, Johannes Krietsch, Clemens Küpper, Andy Kwarteng, Eunbi Kwon, Jean-François Lamarre, Christopher Latty, Nicolas Lecomte, A.H. Loonstra, Zhijun Ma, Lucas Mander, Christopher Marlow, Peter P. Marra, Jose A. Masero, Laura Anne McDuffie, Rebecca L McGuire, Johannes Melter, David S. Melville, Verónica Méndez, Tyler Michels, Christy Morrissey, Tong Mu, David Newstead, Gary W. Page, Allison K. Pierce, Theunis Piersma, Márcio Repenning, Brian H. Robinson, Afonso Rocha, Danny I. Rogers, Amy L. Scarpignato, Shiloh Schulte, Emily Scragg, Nathan R. Senner, Paul Smith, Audrey R. Taylor, Rachel C. Taylor, Böðvar Þórisson, Mihai Valcu, Mo A. Verhoeven, Lena Ware, Nils Warnock, Michael Weber, Lucy J. Wright, Michael B. Wunder
2025, Journal of Avian Biology (2025)
Animal-borne trackers are commonly used to study bird movements, including in long-distance migrants such as shorebirds. Selecting a tracker and attachment method can be daunting, and methodological advancements often have been made by trial and error and conveyed by word of mouth. We synthesized tracking outcomes across...
Simulation of groundwater flow in Wake County, North Carolina, 2000 through 2070
Dominick J. Antolino, Gerard J. Gonthier, Georgina M. Sanchez
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2025-5087
In 2019, the U.S. Geological Survey and Wake County Environmental Services began a collaborative study to evaluate groundwater resources and long-term groundwater availability in the county’s fractured-rock groundwater system. Wake County, in central North Carolina, is experiencing rapid population growth, associated land development, and changing water use. Hydrogeologic data including...
Projecting management-relevant change of undeveloped coastal barriers with the Mesoscale Explicit Ecogeomorphic Barrier model (MEEB) v1.0
Ian Robert Reeves, Andrew D. Ashton, Erika E. Lentz, Christopher R. Sherwood, Davina Passeri, Sara Zeigler
2025, Geoscientific Model Development (18) 9319-9348
Models of coastal barrier geomorphic and ecologic change are valuable tools for understanding and predicting when, where, and how barriers evolve and transition between ecogeomorphic states. Few existing models of barrier systems are designed to operate over spatiotemporal scales congruous with effective management practices (i.e., decades/kilometers, referred to herein as...
Review and synthesis of the applications of machine learning to coalbed methane recovery
Emil Attanasi, Timothy Coburn, Philip A. Freeman
Marko Maucec, Jeffrey M. Yarus, Timothy C. Coburn, Michael Pyrcz, editor(s)
2025, Book chapter, Applied spatiotemporal data analytics and machine learning
Over the last 30 years, a substantial literature has evolved on the use of machine learning (ML) to assess, predict, and improve the efficiency of coalbed methane (CBM) recovery. In the United States, the production of CBM declined as shale gas production matured, but CBM continues to...
Aeromagnetic and magnetotelluric imaging of west-central Idaho and the Stibnite-Yellow Pine mining district: A regional to district perspective
Eric D. Anderson, Brian D. Rodriguez, Karen Lund, Christopher Dail, Bill Breen
2025, Economic Geology (120) 1899-1923
Aeromagnetic and magnetotelluric (MT) data are used to better understand the geology and mineral resources near the Stibnite-Yellow Pine mining district in central Idaho. The reduced-to-pole (RTP) transformation of regional-scale aeromagnetic data shows that allochthonous island-arc rocks west of the Salmon River suture are significantly more magnetic than the Laurentian...
STREAMS guidelines: Standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies
Julia Kelliher, Chloe Mirzayi, Sarah R. Bordenstein, Aaron Oliver, Christina A. Kellogg, Eneida L. Hatcher, Maureen Berg, Petr Baldrian, Mashael Aljumaah, Cassandra Maria Miller, Christopher Mungall, Vlastimil Novak, Alexis Palucki, Ethan Smith, Nazifa Tabassum, Gregory Bonito, J. Rodney Brister, Patrick S. Chain, Jose Pablo Dundore-Arias, Joanne B. Emerson, Vanessa Moreira Fernandes, Roberto Flores, Antonio Gonzalez, Zoe A. Hansen, Scott A. Jackson, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Trent R. Northen, Nonia Pariente, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, Sydne Record, Linta Reji, Anna-Louise Reysenbach, Virginia I. Rich, Lorna Richardson, Simon Roux, Lynn M. Schriml, Reed S. Shabman, Maria A. Sierra, Matthew B. Sullivan, Punithavathi Sundaramurthy, Katherine M. Thibault, Luke R. Thompson, Scott W. Tighe, Ethell Vereen, STREAMS Consortium, Emiley A. Eloe-Fadrosh
2025, Nature Microbiology (10) 3059-3068
The interdisciplinary nature of microbiome research, coupled with the generation of complex multi-omics data, makes knowledge sharing challenging. The Strengthening the Organization and Reporting of Microbiome Studies (STORMS) guidelines provide a checklist for the reporting of study information, experimental design and analytical methods within a scientific manuscript on human microbiome...
Evaluating Three-Dimensional Elevation Program lidar consistency and accuracy at scale using cloud-native, open-source methods
Aparajithan Sampath, Jeffrey Irwin, Jason M. Stoker
2025, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing (91) 777-785
The U.S. Geological Survey three-dimensional elevation program (3DEP) has significantly expanded national lidar coverage, necessitating scalable, reproducible methods for assessing data quality across diverse terrains and acquisition conditions. This study introduces a cloud-native, open-source workflow designed to evaluate the geometric accuracy and consistency of 3DEP lidar data sets at a...
What is the (real) rate of soil health practice adoption? Making sense of three data sources
Bonnie M. McGill, W. Dean Hively, Laila A. Puntel, John Shriver, Alison N. Thieme, Daniel K. Manter, Jennifer M. Moore
2025, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation (80) 724-733
Conservation stakeholders looking to quantify the impact of their investments to increase soil health practice adoption over time often face challenges in interpreting practice adoption data due to discrepancies in language and results among data sources. Similarly, efforts to estimate environmental outcomes of practice adoption, such as water quality and...
The continued decline of the Palila (Loxioides bailleui) on Mauna Kea, Island of Hawaiʻi
Noah Hunt, Chauncey K. Asing, Lindsey Nietmann, Paul C. Banko, Richard J. Camp
2025, Avian Conservation and Ecology (20)
Palila (Loxioides bailleui) are critically endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers specializing on māmane (Sophora chrysophylla) seeds and restricted to Mauna Kea volcano on the Island of Hawaiʻi. Recently, the population was estimated to decline by 89% between 1998 and 2021, despite decades of ungulate removal, fence construction, māmane regeneration, fire suppression, and...
Geothermal potential of orphan oil and gas wells
Rand Gardner, Justin E. Birdwell, Matthew D. Merrill, Ashton M. Wiens, Karl B. Haase, Nicholas J. Gianoutsos, Uei I. Lei, Patrick Sullivan
2025, Conference Paper, Using the Earth to save the Earth
The United States is estimated to have hundreds of thousands of orphan oil and gas wells. Orphan wells are abandoned wells that are both unremediated and have no responsible operator. While traditionally considered environmental and economic liabilities, orphan oil and gas wells may offer new opportunities in sustainable geothermal energy...
Exploring Martian geothermal and liquid water potential with basin modeling
Rand Gardner, Justin E. Birdwell, Katherine L. French, Chris Okubo, Janet K. Pitman, Stanley T. Paxton, Jason A. Flaum
2025, Conference Paper, Using the Earth to save the Earth
Assessing the potential for geothermal energy and liquid water presence in the Martian subsurface is crucial for future exploration and habitability studies. In this work, we employed comprehensive finite element model simulations adapted specifically for Martian conditions to estimate subsurface temperatures and the potential for liquid water at depth within Martian...
Potential for co-production of lithium and geothermal resources in the Gulf Coast
Rand Gardner, Justin E. Birdwell
2025, Conference Paper, Using the Earth to save the Earth
Lithium brine extractions and geothermal resource developments often are not economically viable as standalone projects, but they May become cost effective when the potential for both resources exist within the same reservoir. Subsurface datasets were analyzed to identify areas in the U.S. Gulf Coast region with potential for lithium brine...
Leveraging an observed-data likelihood improves the use of machine learning labels in a Bayesian hierarchical model for bioacoustic data
Jacob Oram, Katharine M. Banner, Christian Stratton, Andrew Hoegh, Kathryn Irvine
2025, Annals of Applied Statistics (19) 2957-2980
Classification of massive datasets by machine learning (ML) algorithms is promising for many scientific domains, especially wildlife monitoring programs that rely on passive acoustic surveys for detecting species. However, treating ML-predicted class labels (e.g., species identity) as truth biases inferences of focal parameters within common modeling frameworks. One solution is...
Range-wide population trend analysis for greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus)—Updated 1960–2024
Brian G. Prochazka, Peter S. Coates, Cameron L. Aldridge, Michael S. O’Donnell, David R. Edmunds, Adrian P. Monroe, Steve E. Hanser, Lief A. Wiechman, Michael P. Chenaille
2025, Data Report 1217
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; hereafter sage-grouse) are at the center of State and national land-use policies largely because of their unique life-history traits as an ecological indicator for the health of sagebrush ecosystems. This updated population trend analysis provides State and Federal land and wildlife managers with the best available...
The Hawaiian Volcanoes Supersite: Open data for the benefit of science and society
Michael Poland, Stefano Salvi, Falk Amelung, Marco Bagnardi, Tyler Grant Paladino, Ingrid A. Johanson, Megan McLay
2025, Bulletin of Volcanology (87)
The Hawaiian Volcanoes Supersite was established in 2008 with the goal of making large amounts of volcano monitoring data, especially satellite measurements, freely available at a site of international interest, scientific importance, and impactful natural hazards. The location was chosen because of the long history of volcanological research and innovation...
Disentangling geomorphic equifinality in sediment and hydrologic connectivity through the analyses of landscape drivers of hysteresis
Jong Cho, J. William Lund, Grady Ball, Jeb E. Brown, Allen C. Gellis, Laura N. Gurley, Scott Douglas Hamshaw, Jeffrey Stephen Kwang, Andrew Roy Laws, Gregory E. Noe, Gretchen P. Oelsner, Francis Parchaso, Cara L. Peterman-Phipps, Katherine Skalak, Nicholas Alan Sutfin
2025, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms (50)
Sources, transport mechanisms and pathways of fine sediment in river systems are dependent on a multitude of climatic, geomorphic and anthropogenic factors, resulting in geomorphic equifinality, in which it is difficult to parse how different landscape processes affect sediment transport across different spatiotemporal scales. The objectives of this study are...
Summer snow determines the depth to ice-cemented ground under dry permafrost in Antarctica
C. P. McKay, M. Marinova, Kaj E. Williams, M. Mellon
2025, Antarctic Science
Dry permafrost underlain by ice-cemented permafrost has been reported in several locations in Antarctica. Initially thought to be relic ice, it is now understood that this subsurface ice is in equilibrium with the surface conditions, although it is not in equilibrium with the atmosphere. We use year-round data from University...
