Reservoirs and water management influence fish mercury concentrations in the western United States and Canada
James J. Willacker, Collin A. Eagles-Smith, Michelle A. Lutz, Michael T. Tate, Jesse M. Lepak, Joshua T. Ackerman
2016, Science of the Total Environment (568) 739-748
Anthropogenic manipulation of aquatic habitats can profoundly alter mercury (Hg) cycling and bioaccumulation. The impoundment of fluvial systems is among the most common habitat manipulations and is known to increase fish Hg concentrations immediately following impoundment. However, it is not well understood how Hg concentrations differ between reservoirs and lakes...
Decomposition drives convergence of forest litter nutrient stoichiometry following phosphorus addition
Tiff L. van Huysen, Steven Perakis, Mark E. Harmon
2016, Plant and Soil (406) 1-14
Background and aims Nutrient levels in decomposing detritus and soil can influence decomposition rates and detrital nutrient dynamics in differing ways among various detrital components of forests. We assessed whether increased phosphorus (P) levels in litter and soil influenced decomposition rates and litter nutrient dynamics of...
Evaluation of a method for quantifying eugenol concentrations in the fillet tissue from freshwater fish species
Jeffery R. Meinertz, Theresa M. Schreier, Scott T. Porcher, Justin Smerud
2016, Journal of AOAC International (99) 558-564
AQUI-S 20E® (active ingredient, eugenol; AQUI-S New Zealand Ltd, Lower Hutt, New Zealand) is being pursued for approval as an immediate-release sedative in the United States. A validated method to quantify the primary residue (the marker residue) in fillet tissue from AQUI-S 20E–exposed fish was needed. A method was evaluated for...
Rapid estimation of earthquake magnitude from the arrival time of the peak high-frequency amplitude
Shunta Noda, Shunroku Yamamoto, William L. Ellsworth
2016, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (106) 232-241
We propose a simple approach to measure earthquake magnitude M using the time difference (Top) between the body‐wave onset and the arrival time of the peak high‐frequency amplitude in an accelerogram. Measured in this manner, we find that Mw is proportional to 2logTop for earthquakes 5≤Mw≤7, which is the theoretical proportionality if Top is proportional to source...
The Earthquake‐Source Inversion Validation (SIV) Project
P. Martin Mai, Danijel Schorlemmer, Morgan T. Page, Jean-Paul Ampuero, Kimiyuki Asano, Mathieu Causse, Susana Custodio, Wenyuan Fan, Gaetano Festa, Martin Galis, Frantisek Gallovic, Walter Imperatori, Martin Kaser, Dmytro Malytskyy, Ryo Okuwaki, Frederick Pollitz, Luca Passone, Hoby N. T. Razafindrakoto, Haruko Sekiguchi, Seok Goo Song, Surendra N. Somala, Kiran K. S. Thingbaijam, Cedric Twardzik, Martin van Driel, Jagdish C. Vyas, Rongjiang Wang, Yuji Yagi, Olaf Zielke
2016, Seismological Research Letters (87) 690-708
Finite‐fault earthquake source inversions infer the (time‐dependent) displacement on the rupture surface from geophysical data. The resulting earthquake source models document the complexity of the rupture process. However, multiple source models for the same earthquake, obtained by different research teams, often exhibit...
StreamThermal: A software package for calculating thermal metrics from stream temperature data
Yin-Phan Tsang, Dana M. Infante, Jana S. Stewart, Lizhu Wang, Ralph Tingly, Darren Thornbrugh, Arthur Cooper, Daniel Wesley
2016, Fisheries (41) 548-554
Improving quality and better availability of continuous stream temperature data allows natural resource managers, particularly in fisheries, to understand associations between different characteristics of stream thermal regimes and stream fishes. However, there is no convenient tool to efficiently characterize multiple metrics reflecting stream thermal regimes with the increasing amount...
Landsat plays a key role in reducing hunger on earth
U.S. Geological Survey
2016, Fact Sheet 2016-3059
The United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts 9.7 billion people will sit down every day to the global dinner table by 2050. If this prediction is correct, the world is going to need more crops, more livestock, and more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices....
Landsat helps bolster food security
U.S. Geological Survey
2016, Fact Sheet 2016-3060
One of the cruelest, most complex narratives in the world today (2019) is written in the hunger of sub-Saharan Africa. When famine is the only yield from the scorched Earth, survival often depends on a heart-rending calculation—how far is the distant feeding center and how close is the nearest well?...
Urban planners and urban geographers turn to Landsat for answers
U.S. Geological Survey
2016, Fact Sheet 2016-3056
Government organizations that manage and mitigate the continued growth of cities are looking increasingly to the sky for assistance....
NHDPlusHR: A national geospatial framework for surface-water information
Roland J. Viger, Alan H. Rea, Jeffrey D. Simley, Karen M. Hanson
2016, JAWRA (52) 901-905
The U.S. Geological Survey is developing a new geospatial hydrographic framework for the United States, called the National Hydrography Dataset Plus High Resolution (NHDPlusHR), that integrates a diversity of the best-available information, robustly supports ongoing dataset improvements, enables hydrographic generalization to derive alternate representations of the network while maintaining feature...
Transboundary fisheries science: Meeting the challenges of inland fisheries management in the 21st century
Stephen R. Midway, Tyler Wagner, Joseph D. Zydlewski, Brian J. Irwin, Craig P. Paukert
2016, Fisheries (41) 536-546
Managing inland fisheries in the 21st century presents several obstacles, including the need to view fisheries from multiple spatial and temporal scales, which usually involves populations and resources spanning sociopolitical boundaries. Though collaboration is not new to fisheries science, inland aquatic systems have historically been managed at local scales and...
Landsat brings understanding to the impact of industrialization
U.S. Geological Survey
2016, Fact Sheet 2016-3054
In his 1963 book, “The Quiet Crisis,” former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall lamented what he called the decline of natural resources in the United States under the advancements of industrialization and urbanization....
Sedimentation survey of Lago Lucchetti, Yauco, Puerto Rico, September 2013–May 2014
Julieta Gómez-Fragoso
2016, Scientific Investigations Map 3364
The U.S. Geological Survey conducted a sedimentation survey of Lago Lucchetti, Yauco, Puerto Rico, in 2013–14 in cooperation with the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority. The survey updated a previous survey, conducted in 2000, and provided accurate information regarding reservoir storage capacity and sedimentation rate using bathymetric techniques and...
Simulation of climate change effects on streamflow, groundwater, and stream temperature using GSFLOW and SNTEMP in the Black Earth Creek Watershed, Wisconsin
Randall J. Hunt, Stephen M. Westenbroek, John F. Walker, William R. Selbig, R. Steven Regan, Andrew T. Leaf, David A. Saad
2016, Scientific Investigations Report 2016-5091
A groundwater/surface-water model was constructed and calibrated for the Black Earth Creek watershed in south-central Wisconsin. The model was then run to simulate scenarios representing common societal concerns in the basin, focusing on maintaining a cold-water resource in an urbanizing fringe near its upper stream reaches and minimizing downstream flooding....
The Eastern California Shear Zone as the northward extension of the southern San Andreas Fault
Wayne R. Thatcher, James C. Savage, Robert W. Simpson
2016, Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth (121) 2904-2914
Cluster analysis offers an agnostic way to organize and explore features of the current GPS velocity field without reference to geologic information or physical models using information only contained in the velocity field itself. We have used cluster analysis of the Southern California Global Positioning System (GPS) velocity field to...
State-space modeling of population sizes and trends in Nihoa Finch and Millerbird
P. Marcos Gorresen, Kevin W. Brinck, Richard J. Camp, Chris Farmer, Sheldon M. Plentovich, Paul C. Banko
2016, Condor (118) 542-557
Both of the 2 passerines endemic to Nihoa Island, Hawai‘i, USA—the Nihoa Millerbird (Acrocephalus familiaris kingi) and Nihoa Finch (Telespiza ultima)—are listed as endangered by federal and state agencies. Their abundances have been estimated by irregularly implemented fixed-width strip-transect sampling from 1967 to 2012, from which area-based extrapolation of the...
Geology, hydrology, water quality, and potential for interbasin invasive-species spread by way of the groundwater pathway near Lemont, Illinois
Robert T. Kay, P.C. Mills, P. Ryan Jackson
2016, Scientific Investigations Report 2016-5095
Invasive species such as Asian carps have the potential to travel in the egg, larval, or fry stages from the Des Plaines River (DPR) to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) by way of the network of secondary-permeability features in the dolomite aquifer between these water bodies. Such movement...
Kinematic ground motion simulations on rough faults including effects of 3D stochastic velocity perturbations
Robert Graves, Arben Pitarka
2016, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (106) 2136-2153
We describe a methodology for generating kinematic earthquake ruptures for use in 3D ground‐motion simulations over the 0–5 Hz frequency band. Our approach begins by specifying a spatially random slip distribution that has a roughly wavenumber‐squared fall‐off. Given a hypocenter, the rupture speed is specified to average about 75%–80% of the...
Feeding periodicity, diet composition, and food consumption of subyearling rainbow trout in winter
James H. Johnson, Marc Chalupnicki, Ross Abbett
2016, Environmental Biology of Fishes (99) 771-778
Although winter is a critically important period for stream salmonids, aspects of the ecology of several species are poorly understood. Consequently, we examined the diel feeding ecology of subyearling rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) during winter in a central New York stream. Rainbow trout diet was significantly different during...
Climate warming reduces fish production and benthic habitat in Lake Tanganyika, one of the most biodiverse freshwater ecosystems
Andrew S. Cohen, Elizabeth L. Gergurich, Benjamin M. Kraemer, Michael M. McGlue, Peter B. McIntyre, James M. Russell, Jack D. Simmons, Peter W. Swarzenski
2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (113) 9563-9568
Warming climates are rapidly transforming lake ecosystems worldwide, but the breadth of changes in tropical lakes is poorly documented. Sustainable management of freshwater fisheries and biodiversity requires accounting for historical and ongoing stressors such as climate change and harvest intensity. This is problematic in tropical Africa, where records of ecosystem...
Noise reduction in long‐period seismograms by way of array summing
Adam T. Ringler, David C. Wilson, Tyler Storm, Benjamin T. Marshall, Charles R. Hutt, Austin Holland
2016, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (106) 1991-1997
Long‐period (>100 s period) seismic data can often be dominated by instrumental noise as well as local site noise. When multiple collocated sensors are installed at a single site, it is possible to improve the overall station noise levels by applying stacking methods to their traces. We look at the noise...
A call to insect scientists: Challenges and opportunities of managing insect communities under climate change
Jessica J. Hellmann, Ralph Grundel, Chris Hoving, Gregor W. Schuurman
2016, Current Opinion in Insect Science (17) 92-97
As climate change moves insect systems into uncharted territory, more knowledge about insect dynamics and the factors that drive them could enable us to better manage and conserve insect communities. Climate change may also require us revisit insect management goals and strategies and lead to a new kind of scientific...
Transition of vegetation states positively affects harvester ants in the Great Basin, United States
Joseph D. Holbrook, David S. Pilliod, Robert Arkle, Janet L. Rachlow, Kerri T. Vierling, Michelle M. Wiest
2016, Rangeland Ecology and Management (69) 449-456
Invasions by non-native plants can alter ecosystems such that new ecological states are reached, but less is known about how these transitions influence animal populations. Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) ecosystems are experiencing state changes because of fire and invasion by exotic annual grasses. Our goal was to study the effects of...
Sulfur species in source rock bitumen before and after hydrous pyrolysis determined by X-ray absorption near-edge structure
Trudy B. Bolin, Justin E. Birdwell, Michael Lewan, Ronald J. Hill, Michael B. Grayson, Sudipa Mitra-Kirtley, Kyle D. Bake, Paul R. Craddock, Wael Abdallah, Andrew E. Pomerantz
2016, Energy & Fuels (30) 6264-6270
The sulfur speciation of source rock bitumen (chloroform-extractable organic matter in sedimentary rocks) was examined using sulfur K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy for a suite of 11 source rocks from around the world. Sulfur speciation was determined for both the native bitumen in thermally immature rocks and the...
Preserving prairies: Understanding temporal and spatial patterns of invasive annual bromes in the Northern Great Plains
Isabel Ashton, Amy J. Symstad, Christopher Davis, Daniel J. Swanson
2016, Ecosphere (7)
Two Eurasian invasive annual brome grasses, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) and Japanese brome (Bromus japonicus), are well known for their impact in steppe ecosystems of the western United States where these grasses have altered fire regimes, reduced native plant diversity and abundance, and degraded wildlife habitat. Annual bromes are also abundant...
