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In the summer of 2022, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and partners successfully completed the first single-year, aerial photo survey of sea otters across the entire Southeast stock of northern sea otters. This document presents the latest findings from the 2022 Southeast Alaska Sea Otter Survey, providing up-to-date information...

This report describes a decision analysis process that was conducted in support of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Environmental Assessment on Arctic grayling (Thymallus arcticus) on Red Rocks Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the Centennial Valley, Montana....

Marine benthic invertebrates (benthos) are key components of the Puget Sound ecosystem. Because of their direct association living in, and sometimes consuming, sediments, benthos can be valuable sentinels of ecosystem health. Therefore, indicators of benthic invertebrate community health can serve as direct measures of sediment and water quality. In 2021,...

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD), a product suite produced through the MultiResolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium, is an operational land cover monitoring program. Starting from a base year of 2001, NLCD releases a land cover database every 2–3-years. The recent release of NLCD2019 extends the database to 18 years. We...

The loss of ecosystem services due to climate change and coastal development is projected to have significant impacts on local economies and conservation of natural resources. Consequently, there has been an increase in coastal management activities such as living shorelines, oyster reef restoration, marsh restoration, beach and dune nourishment, and...

Quantifying the effects of streamflow alteration on assemblage response is central to understanding the role humans play in shaping aquatic environments. These changes represent a level of complexity that impedes developing quantitative links between flow and ecological response because stream hydrology is strongly intertwined with natural and anthropogenic factors. Better...

Natural methane (CH4) emissions from aquatic ecosystems may rise because of human-induced climate warming, although the magnitude of increase is highly uncertain. Using an exceptionally large CH4 flux dataset (~19,000 chamber measurements) and remotely sensed information, we modeled plot- and landscape-scale wetland CH4 emissions from the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), North America’s...

An original magnetotelluric (MT) survey collected in 2017 included 42 MT stations mainly in the northwestern part of The Geysers geothermal field in northern California. These data were modeled in 3D and imaged the electrically conductive cover, the electrically resistive steam field, and the electrically resistive Geysers plutonic complex...

Freshwater ecosystems, including lakes, streams, and wetlands, are responsive to climate change and other natural and anthropogenic stresses. These ecosystems are frequently hydrologically and ecologically connected with one another and their surrounding landscapes, thereby integrating changes throughout their watersheds. The responses of any given freshwater ecosystem...

Within the western United States, increasingly severe and frequent wildfires may alter the magnitude, timing, and quality of water exported from burned areas by streams. Post-fire hydrologic studies often focus on peak stream flow responses to shifts in runoff generation or...

Many pressing conservation issues are complex problems caused by multiple social and environmental drivers; their resolution is aided by interdisciplinary teams of scientists, decision makers, and stakeholders working together. In these situations, how do we generate science to effectively guide conservation (resource management and policy) decisions? This paper...

Long waves play an important role in coastal inundation and shoreline and dune erosion, requiring a detailed understanding of their evolution in nearshore regions and interaction with shorelines. While their generation and dissipation mechanisms are...

Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus Kuhl, 1820) are one of the world’s largest snake species, making them a highly successful and biologically damaging invasive predator in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem, Florida, USA. Though we have knowledge of python diet within this system, we understand very little of other interactions with native...

Predicting and mitigating the impact of anthropogenic barriers on migratory fish requires an understanding of the individual and environmental factors that influence barrier passage. Here, the upstream spawning migrations of iteroparous twaite shad Alosa fallax were investigated over three successive spawning migrations in a highly fragmented river...

The Quaternary Clear Lake Volcanic Field (CLVF) in the Northern California Coast Range is the youngest of a string of northward-younging volcanic centers in the state. The CLVF is located within the broad San Andreas Transform Fault System and has been active intermittently for ∼2 million years. Heat beneath...

Co-occurring species with similar resource requirements often partition ecological niches at different spatial and temporal scales. In the Northwest Atlantic (NWA), federally endangered roseate terns Sterna dougallii nest almost exclusively in coastal island colonies alongside common terns S....

IntroductionFloods are one of the most frequent and expensive natural disasters that occur across the United States. Rapid, high-water events that occur in local areas—flash floods—are especially difficult for emergency managers to predict and provide advance warning to the public, and insufficient data can hamper postflood recovery efforts. Central Texas...

Cities have important and varying incentives to transform their energy sector to all-electric with low carbon emissions. However, they often encounter a number of impediments when attempting to implement such a change. For example, while urban areas have the highest energy demand-density, cities often lack the space for installing additional...

Coastal resources are increasingly affected by erosion, extreme weather events, sea level rise, tidal flooding, and other potential hazards related to climate change. These hazards have varying effects on coastal landscapes because of the compounding of geologic, oceanographic, ecologic, and socioeconomic factors that exist at a given location. An assessment...

PurposeThe sensitivity of wildland plants to temperature can be directly measured using experimental manipulations of temperature in situ. We show that soil surface temperature and plant density (per square meter) have a significant impact on the germination, growth, and phenology of Bromus tectorum L., cheatgrass, a short-statured invasive winter-annual grass,...

The mechanisms that led to the exceptionally large Kīlauea 2018 eruption are still poorly understood and actively debated. External processes such as rainfall events or flank sliding have been proposed to play a triggering role. Here, we present field, geophysical, and petrological observations to show that...

Established in 1935, the CRU program is a unique cooperative partnership among State Fish and Wildlife agencies, host universities, Wildlife Management Institute, U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Designed to meet the scientific needs of natural resource management agencies and to produce trained wildlife management professionals,...

Executive SummaryThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is considering changes to the management of water surface elevation in four lakes in the Mahoning River Basin. These changes would affect the timing and amounts of water released to the Mahoning River and could affect the water quality of those releases....

Pollen records from the unglaciated southeastern region of North America provide an overview of biogeographic changes associated with vegetational migration northward following the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Changing insolation during the Holocene affected forest composition on the Coastal Plain, and rising sea level controlled the distribution of marsh and forested wetlands throughout the...

Graphite Creek is an unusual flake graphite deposit located on the Seward Peninsula, Alaska, USA. We present field observations, uranium-lead (U–Pb) monazite and titanite geochronology, carbon (C) and sulfur (S) stable isotope geochemistry, and graphite Raman spectroscopy data from this deposit that support a new model of flake graphite ore...