Biological invasions, ecological resilience and adaptive governance
Brian C. Chaffin, Ahjond S. Garmestani, David G. Angeler, Dustin L. Herrmann, Craig A. Stow, Magnus Nystrom, Jan Sendzimir, Matthew E. Hopton, Jurek Kolasa, Craig R. Allen
2016, Journal of Environmental Management (183) 399-407
In a world of increasing interconnections in global trade as well as rapid change in climate and land cover, the accelerating introduction and spread of invasive species is a critical concern due to associated negative social and ecological impacts, both real and perceived. Much of the societal response to invasive...
Haemosporidian parasite infections in grouse and ptarmigan: Prevalence and genetic diversity of blood parasites in resident Alaskan birds
Matthew M. Smith, Caroline R. Van Hemert, Richard Merizon
2016, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife (5) 229-239
Projections related to future climate warming indicate the potential for an increase in the distribution and prevalence of blood parasites in northern regions. However, baseline data are lacking for resident avian host species in Alaska. Grouse and ptarmigan occupy a diverse range of habitat types throughout the northern hemisphere and...
Summary of SPT based field case history data of CETIN (2016) database
K. Onder Cetin, Raymond B. Seed, Robert E. Kayen, Robb E. S. Moss, H. Tolga Bilge, Makbule Ilgac, Khaled Chowdhury
2016, Report
This report provides documentation of the Cetin et al. (2016) field performance case histories, probabilistic maximum likelihood assessment and the sources of differences between the liquefaction triggering resistance estimations (CRR values) of the widely used liquefaction triggering relationships of Seed et al. (1985), Cetin et al. (2004, 2016) and Boulanger...
Indications of a positive feedback between coastal development and beach nourishment
Scott Armstrong, Eli D. Lazarus, Patrick W. Limber, Evan B. Goldstein, Curtis Thorpe, Rhoda Ballinger
2016, Earth's Future (4) 626-635
Beach nourishment, a method for mitigating coastal storm damage or chronic erosion by deliberately replacing sand on an eroded beach, has been the leading form of coastal protection in the U.S. for four decades. However, investment in hazard protection can have the unintended consequence of encouraging development in places especially...
Population-specific life histories contribute to metapopulation viability
Samniqueka J. Halsey, Timothy J. Bell, Kathryn McEachern, Noel B. Pavlovic
2016, Ecosphere (7) 1-13
Restoration efforts can be improved by understanding how variations in life-history traits occur within populations of the same species living in different environments. This can be done by first understanding the demographic responses of natural occurring populations. Population viability analysis continues to be useful to species management and conservation with...
Topographic and fire weather controls of fire refugia in forested ecosystems of northwestern North America
Meg A. Krawchuk, Sandra L. Haire, Jonathan D. Coop, Marc-André Parisien, Ellen Whitman, Geneva W. Chong, Carol Miller
2016, Ecosphere (7) 1-18
Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental contexts. Here, we develop and test a conceptual model for how predictability of...
The relative contributions of disease and insects in the decline of a long-lived tree: a stochastic demographic model of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis)
Erik S Jules, Jenell I. Jackson, Phillip J. van Mantgem, Jennifer S. Beck, Michael P. Murray, E. April Sahara
2016, Forest Ecology and Management (381) 144-156
Pathogens and insect pests have become increasingly important drivers of tree mortality in forested ecosystems. Unfortunately, understanding the relative contributions of multiple mortality agents to the population decline of trees is difficult, because it requires frequent measures of tree survival, growth, and recruitment, as well as the incidence of mortality...
Petroleum system model of the Upper Devonian-Lower Mississippian Bakken Formation in the northern Williston Basin, Saskatchewan, southwestern Manitoba, and southeastern Alberta, Canada
Debra K. Higley, Nicholas J. Gianoutsos
2016, Book chapter, Hydrocarbon source rocks in unconventional plays, Rocky Mountain region: RMAG guidebook
No abstract available....
Powell Center Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 1
Marcia McNiff
2016, Report
Newsletter for the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, covering news from most of FY2016....
Using large-scale flow experiments to rehabilitate Colorado River ecosystem function in Grand Canyon: Basis for an adaptive climate-resilient strategy
Theodore S. Melis, William E. Pine III, Josh Korman, Michael D. Yard, Shaleen Jain, Roger S. Pulwarty
Kathleen Miller, Alan F. Hamlet, Douglas S. Kenney, Kelly T. Redmond, editor(s)
2016, Book chapter, Water policy and planning in a variable and changing climate
Adaptive management of Glen Canyon Dam is improving downstream resources of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Canyon National Park. The Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP), a federal advisory committee of 25 members with diverse special interests tasked to advise the U.S. Department...
Modeling and simulation of storm surge on Staten Island to understand inundation mitigation strategies
Michael E. Kress, Alan I. Benimoff, William J. Fritz, Cindy A. Thatcher, Brian O. Blanton, Eugene Dzedzits
2016, Journal of Coastal Research (Special Issue 76) 149-161
Hurricane Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012, near Brigantine, New Jersey, and had a transformative impact on Staten Island and the New York Metropolitan area. Of the 43 New York City fatalities, 23 occurred on Staten Island. The borough, with a population of approximately 500,000, experienced some of the...
Creating a Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) for science and conservation applications
Cindy A. Thatcher, John Brock, Jeffrey J. Danielson, Sandra K. Poppenga, Dean B. Gesch, Monica Palaseanu-Lovejoy, John Barras, Gayla A. Evans, Ann Gibbs
2016, Journal of Coastal Research (Special Issue 76) 64-74
The U.S. Geological Survey is creating the Coastal National Elevation Database, an expanding set of topobathymetric elevation models that extend seamlessly across coastal regions of high societal or ecological significance in the United States that are undergoing rapid change or are threatened by inundation hazards. Topobathymetric elevation models are raster...
Evaluating early-warning indicators of critical transitions in natural aquatic ecosystems
Alena Sonia Gsell, Ulrike Scharfenberger, Deniz Ozkundakci, Annika W. Walters, Lars-Anders Hansson, Annette B. G. Janssen, Peeter Noges, Philip Reid, Daniel Schindler, Ellen van Donk, Vasilis Dakos, Rita Adrian
2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (113) E8089-E8095
Ecosystems can show sudden and persistent changes in state despite only incremental changes in drivers. Such critical transitions are difficult to predict, because the state of the system often shows little change before the transition. Early-warning indicators (EWIs) are hypothesized to signal the loss of system resilience and have been...
Use of noninvasive genetics to assess nest and space use by white-tailed eagles
Zafer Bulut, Evgeny A. Bragin, J. Andrew DeWoody, Melissa A. Braham, Todd E. Katzner, Jacqueline M. Doyle
2016, Journal of Raptor Research (50) 351-362
Movement and space use are important components of animal interactions with the environment. However, for hard-to-monitor raptor species, there are substantial gaps in our understanding of these key determinants. We used noninvasive genetic tools to evaluate the details of space use over a 3-yr period by White-tailed Eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla)...
The Permian–Triassic transition in Colorado
James S. Hagadorn, Karen R. Whitely, Bonita L. Lahey, Charles M. Henderson, Christopher S. Holm-Denoma
2016, GSA Field Guides (44) 73-92
The Lykins Formation and its equivalents in Colorado are a stratigraphically poorly constrained suite of redbeds and intercalated stromatolitic carbonates, which is hypothesized to span the Permian-Triassic boundary. Herein we present a preliminary detrital zircon geochronology, new fossil occurrences, and δ13C chemostratigraphy for exposures along the Front Range and...
Marine ecoregion and Deepwater Horizon oil spill affect recruitment and population structure of a salt marsh snail
Steven C. Pennings, Scott Zengel, Jacob Oehrig, Merryl Alber, T. Dale Bishop, Donald R. Deis, Donna Devlin, A. Randall Hughes, John J. Hutchens Jr., Whitney M. Kiehn, Caroline R. McFarlin, Clay L. Montague, Sean P. Powers, C. Edward Proffitt, Nicolle Rutherford, Camille L. Stagg, Keith Walters
2016, Ecosphere (7)
Marine species with planktonic larvae often have high spatial and temporal variation in recruitment that leads to subsequent variation in the ecology of benthic adults. Using a combination of published and unpublished data, we compared the population structure of the salt marsh snail, Littoraria irrorata, between the South Atlantic Bight...
Clinal patterns in genetic variation for northern leopard frog (Rana pipiens): Conservation status and population histories
Craig A. Stockwell, Justin D.L. Fisher, Kyle I. McLean
2016, Wetlands (36) 437-443
The security of the northern leopard frog (Rana pipiens) varies spatially with populations east and west of North Dakota considered as secure and at risk, respectively. We used genetic markers to characterize the conservation status of northern leopard frog populations across North Dakota. We used multiple regression analyses...
Does paleoseismology forecast the historic rates of large earthquakes on the San Andreas fault system?
Glenn Biasi, Katherine M. Scharer, Ray J. Weldon, Timothy E. Dawson
2016, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 7th PATA Days, 2016
The 98-year open interval since the most recent ground-rupturing earthquake in the greater San Andreas boundary fault system would not be predicted by the quasi-periodic recurrence statistics from paleoseismic data. We examine whether the current hiatus could be explained by uncertainties in earthquake dating. Using seven independent paleoseismic records,...
Population demographics for the federally endangered dwarf wedgemussel
Heather S. Galbraith, William A. Lellis, Jeffrey C. Cole, Carrie J. Blakeslee, Barbara St. John White
2016, Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management (7) 377-387
The dwarf wedgemussel, Alasmidonta heterodon, is a federally endangered freshwater mussel species inhabiting several Atlantic Slope rivers. Studies on population demographics of this species are necessary for status assessment and directing recovery efforts. We conducted qualitative and quantitative surveys for dwarf wedgemussel in the mainstem Delaware River and in four...
The 2016 groundwater flow model for Dane County, Wisconsin
Michael J. Parsen, Kenneth R. Bradbury, Randall J. Hunt, Daniel T. Feinstein
2016, Bulletin 110
A new groundwater flow model for Dane County, Wisconsin, replaces an earlier model developed in the 1990s by the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (WGNHS) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This modeling study was conducted cooperatively by the WGNHS and the USGS with funding from the Capital Area...
Overpressure development through time using 4D pressure-volume-temperature modeling in the deep Anadarko Basin, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas
Debra K. Higley
2016, Book chapter, Hydrocarbon source rocks in unconventional plays, Rocky Mountain region: RMAG guidebook
No abstract available....
Habitat selection by Forster's Terns (Sterna forsteri) at multiple spatial scales in an urbanized estuary: The importance of salt ponds
Jill Bluso-Demers, Joshua T. Ackerman, John Y. Takekawa, Sarah H. Peterson
2016, Waterbirds (39) 375-387
The highly urbanized San Francisco Bay Estuary, California, USA, is currently undergoing large-scale habitat restoration, and several thousand hectares of former salt evaporation ponds are being converted to tidal marsh. To identify potential effects of this habitat restoration on breeding waterbirds, habitat selection of radiotagged Forster's Terns (Sterna forsteri) was...
Testing geomorphology-derived rupture histories against the paleoseismic record of the southern San Andreas fault
Katherine M. Scharer, Ray J. Weldon, Sean Bemis
2016, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 7th PATA Days, 2016
Evidence for the 340-km-long Fort Tejon earthquake of 1857 is found at each of the high-resolution paleoseismic sites on the southern San Andreas Fault. Using trenching data from these sites, we find that the assemblage of dated paleoearthquakes recurs quasi-periodically (coefficient of variation, COV, of 0.6, Biasi, 2013) and requires...
Geological, geochemical, and reservoir characterization of the Uteland Butte member of the Green River Formation, Uinta Basin, Utah
Justin E. Birdwell, Michael D. Vanden Berg, Ronald C. Johnson, Tracey J. Mercier, Adam Boehlke, Michael E. Brownfield
Michael P. Dolan, Debra K. Higley, Paul G. Lillis, editor(s)
2016, Book chapter, Hydrocarbon source rocks in unconventional plays, Rocky Mountain Region
No abstract available....
Assessing Brook Trout populations in headwater streams of the Adirondack Mountains using environmental DNA -- Summary report
Barry P. Baldigo, Scott D. George, Lee Ann Sporn, Jacob Ball
2016, NYSERDA Report 17-02
This project evaluated standard fish-survey and environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling methods to determine the ability of eDNA to accurately predict the presence and abundance of resident Brook Trout populations in 40 headwater streams mainly in the western Adirondack Mountains during 2014–2015 (Figure 2). Standard 3-pass electrofishing surveys found that Brook...
