Drivers of Caribbean freshwater ecosystems and fisheries
Thomas J. Kwak, Augustin C. Engman, Jesse R. Fischer, Craig G. Lilyestrom
2016, Book chapter, Freshwater, fish and the future: Proceedings of the Global Cross-Sectoral Conference
No abstract available....
Integrated groundwater data management
Peter Fitch, Boyan Brodaric, Matt Stenson, Nathaniel Booth
Anthony J. Jakeman, Olivier Barreteau, Randall J. Hunt, Jean-Daniel Rinaudo, Andrew Ross, editor(s)
2016, Book chapter, Integrated groundwater management
The goal of a data manager is to ensure that data is safely stored, adequately described, discoverable and easily accessible. However, to keep pace with the evolution of groundwater studies in the last decade, the associated data and data management requirements have changed significantly. In particular, there is a growing...
Upper bound of pier scour in laboratory and field data
Stephen Benedict, Andral W. Caldwell
2016, Transportation Research Record (2588) 145-153
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the South Carolina Department of Transportation, conducted several field investigations of pier scour in South Carolina and used the data to develop envelope curves defining the upper bound of pier scour. To expand on this previous work, an additional cooperative investigation was...
Coupling centennial-scale shoreline change to sea-level rise and coastal morphology in the Gulf of Mexico using a Bayesian network
Nathaniel G. Plant
2016, Earth's Future (4)
Predictions of coastal evolution driven by episodic and persistent processes associated with storms and relative sea-level rise (SLR) are required to test our understanding, evaluate our predictive capability, and to provide guidance for coastal management decisions. Previous work demonstrated that the spatial variability of long-term shoreline change can be predicted...
Hydrologic response of desert wetlands to Holocene climate change: preliminary results from the Soda Springs area, Mojave National Preserve, California
Jeffrey S. Pigati, Marith C. Reheis, John P. McGeehin, Jeffrey S. Honke, J. Bright
2016, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 1st Death Valley Natural History Conference
Desert wetlands are common features in arid environments and include a variety of hydrologic facies, including seeps, springs, marshes, wet meadows, ponds, and spring pools. Wet ground conditions and dense stands of vegetation in these settings combine to trap eolian, alluvial, and fluvial sediments that accumulate over time....
Biological soil crusts
Jayne Belnap
2016, Book chapter, Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas
No abstract available....
RE: Costs of European wolf and human coexistence
L. David Mech
2016, Science
No abstract available....
Implications of the methodological choices for hydrologic portrayals of climate change over the contiguous United States: Statistically downscaled forcing data and hydrologic models
Naoki Mizukami, Martyn P. Clark, Ethan D. Gutmann, Pablo A. Mendoza, Andrew J. Newman, Bart Nijssen, Ben Livneh, Lauren E. Hay, Jeffrey R. Arnold, Levi D. Brekke
2016, Journal of Hydrometeorology (17) 75-98
Continental-domain assessments of climate change impacts on water resources typically rely on statistically downscaled climate model outputs to force hydrologic models at a finer spatial resolution. This study examines the effects of four statistical downscaling methods [bias-corrected constructed analog (BCCA), bias-corrected spatial disaggregation applied at daily (BCSDd) and monthly scales...
Volcanogenic massive sulphide and orogenic gold deposits of northern southeast Alaska
Patrick J Sack, Susan M. Karl, Nathan Steeves, J Bruce Gemmell
2016, Book
This five-day field trip visits the most significant mineral deposits in northern southeast Alaska. The trip begins and ends with regional transects in the interior Intermontane terranes around Whitehorse, Yukon, and the Insular terranes along the northern Chatham Strait region of southeast Alaska (Fig. A-1 and Fig. A-2; Plate-1). To...
Kriging and local polynomial methods for blending satellite-derived and gauge precipitation estimates to support hydrologic early warning systems
Andrew Verdin, Christopher C. Funk, Balaji Rajagopalan, William Kleiber
2016, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (54) 2552-2562
Robust estimates of precipitation in space and time are important for efficient natural resource management and for mitigating natural hazards. This is particularly true in regions with developing infrastructure and regions that are frequently exposed to extreme events. Gauge observations of rainfall are sparse but capture the precipitation process with...
High performance computing to support multiscale representation of hydrography for the conterminous United States
Larry V. Stanislawski, Yan Liu, Barbara P. Buttenfield, Kornelijus Survila, Jeffrey Wendel, Abdurraouf Okok
2016, Conference Paper, 19th ICA Workshop, Automated Generalisation for On-Demand Mapping
The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) for the United States furnishes a comprehensive set of vector features representing the surface-waters in the country (U.S. Geological Survey 2000). The high-resolution (HR) layer of the NHD is largely comprised of hydrographic features originally derived from 1:24,000-scale (24K) U.S. Topographic maps. However, in recent...
Influence of basin- and local-scale environmental conditions on nearshore production in the northeast Pacific Ocean
Vanessa R. von Biela, Christian E. Zimmerman, Gordon H. Kruse, Franz J. Mueter, Bryan A. Black, David C. Douglas, James L. Bodkin
2016, Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science (8) 502-521
Nearshore marine habitats are productive and vulnerable owing to their connections to pelagic and terrestrial landscapes. To understand how ocean basin- and local-scale conditions may influence nearshore species, we developed an annual index of nearshore production (spanning the period 1972–2010) from growth increments recorded in otoliths of representative pelagic-feeding (Black...
Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Programme coastal biodiversity monitoring background paper
Donald McLennan, Rebecca Anderson, S. Wegeberg, Maria Pettersvik Arvnes, Liudmila Sergienko, Carolina Behe, Pitseolak Moss-Davies, S. Fritz, Carl J. Markon, T. Christensen, T. Barry, C. Price
2016, Report
In 2014, the United States (U.S.) and Canada agreed to act as co-lead countries for the initial development of the Coastal Expert Monitoring Group (CEMG) as part of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP, www. cbmp.is) under the Arctic Council’s Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF, www.caff.is) working group....
The story of rising voices: Facilitating collaboration between indigenous and western ways of knowing
Julie Maldonado, Heather Lazrus, Shiloh-Kay Bennett, Karletta Chief, Carla May Dhillon, Bob Gough, Linda Kruger, Jeffrey T. Morisette, Stefan Petrovic, Kyle P. Whyte
Michele Companion, Miriam S. Chaiken, editor(s)
2016, Book chapter, Responses to disasters and climate change: Understanding vulnerability and fostering resilience
Indigenous community self-determination, cultures, and ways of life are at high risk from climate change impacts and ecological dispossession. Partnerships between experts with backgrounds in Indigenous and western knowledge may be productive and effective ways to reduce vulnerability and foster resilience. This chapter examines collaborations among scientific and Native American,...
Modeling abundance using hierarchical distance sampling
J. Andrew Royle, Marc Kery
2016, Book chapter
In this chapter, we provide an introduction to classical distance sampling ideas for point and line transect data, and for continuous and binned distance data. We introduce the conditional and the full likelihood, and we discuss Bayesian analysis of these models in BUGS using the idea of data augmentation, which...
Louisiana waterthrush and benthic macroinvertebrate response to shale gas development
Petra Wood, Mack W. Frantz, Douglas A. Becker
2016, Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management (7) 423-433
Because shale gas development is occurring over large landscapes and consequently is affecting many headwater streams, an understanding of its effects on headwater-stream faunal communities is needed. We examined effects of shale gas development (well pads and associated infrastructure) on Louisiana waterthrush Parkesia motacilla and benthic macroinvertebrate communities in 12...
Influence of land-atmosphere feedbacks on temperature and precipitation extremes in the GLACE-CMIP5 ensemble
Ruth Lorenz, Daniel Argueso, Markus G. Donat, Andrew J. Pitman, Bart van den Hurk, Alexis Berg, David M. Lawrence, Frederique Cheruy, Agnes Ducharne, Stefan Hagemann, Arndt Meier, Paul C.D. Milly, Sonia I Seneviratne
2016, Journal of Geophysical Research D: Atmospheres (121) 607-623
We examine how soil moisture variability and trends affect the simulation of temperature and precipitation extremes in six global climate models using the experimental protocol of the Global Land-Atmosphere Coupling Experiment of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 5 (GLACE-CMIP5). This protocol enables separate examinations of the influences of soil moisture...
Assessing the potential for rainbow trout reproduction in tributaries of the Mountain Fork River below Broken Bow Dam, southeastern Oklahoma
James M. Long, Trevor A. Starks, Tyler Farling, Robert Bastarache
2016, e-Research Paper SRS–58
Stocked trout (Salmonidae) in reservoir tailwater systems in the Southern United States have been shown to use tributary streams for spawning and rearing. The lower Mountain Fork of the Little River below Broken Bow Dam is one of two year-round tailwater trout fisheries in Oklahoma, and the only one with...
Modelling with stakeholders - Next generation
Alexey Voinov, Nagesh Kolagani, Michael K McCall, Pierre D. Glynn, Marit E Kragt, Frank O Ostermann, Suzanne A Pierce, Palaniappan Ramu
2016, Environmental Modelling and Software (77) 196-220
This paper updates and builds on ‘Modelling with Stakeholders’ Voinov and Bousquet, 2010 which demonstrated the importance of, and demand for, stakeholder participation in resource and environmental modelling. This position paper returns to the concepts of that publication and reviews the progress made since 2010. A new development is the...
Rating curve uncertainty: A comparison of estimation methods
Mason Jr., Julie E. Kiang, Timothy A. Cohn
George Constantinescu, Marcelo H. Garcia, Dan Hanes, editor(s)
2016, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the international conference on fluvial hydraulics (river flow 2016)
The USGS is engaged in both internal development and collaborative efforts to evaluate existing methods for characterizing the uncertainty of streamflow measurements (gaugings), stage-discharge relations (ratings), and, ultimately, the streamflow records derived from them. This paper provides a brief overview of two candidate methods that may be used to characterize...
Functional integrity of freshwater forested wetlands, hydrologic alteration, and climate change
Beth A. Middleton, Nicholas J. Souter
2016, Ecosystem Health and Sustainability (2) 1-18
Climate change will challenge managers to balance the freshwater needs of humans and wetlands. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that most regions of the world will be exposed to higher temperatures, CO2, and more erratic precipitation, with some regions likely to have alternating episodes of intense flooding and...
Water data to answer urgent water policy questions: Monitoring design, available data, and filling data gaps for determining whether shale gas development activities contaminate surface water or groundwater in the Susquehanna River Basin
Elin A. Betanzo, Erik R. Hagen, John T. Wilson, Kenneth H. Reckhow, Laura Hayes, Denise M. Argue, Allegra A. Cangelosi
2016, Report
Throughout its history, the United States has made major investments in assessing natural resources, such as soils, timber, oil and gas, and water. These investments allow policy makers, the private sector and the American public to make informed decisions about cultivating, harvesting or conserving these resources to maximize their value...
Lahar
Richard B. Waitt
2016, Book chapter
A lahar is a flowing slurry of rock debris and water originating on the slopes of a volcano. The term may also mean the deposit of such a flow....
Conflation and integration of archived geologic maps and associated uncertainties
Thomas G. Shoberg
2016, Journal of Geography and Geology (8) 28-40
Old, archived geologic maps are often available with little or no associated metadata. This creates special problems in terms of extracting their data to use with a modern database. This research focuses on some problems and uncertainties associated with conflating older geologic maps in regions where modern geologic maps are,...
Does the stress-gradient hypothesis hold water? Disentangling spatial and temporal variation in plant effects on soil moisture in dryland systems
Bradley J. Butterfield, John B. Bradford, Cristina Armas, Ivan Prieto, Francisco I. Pugnaire
2016, Functional Ecology (30) 10-19
The nature of the relationship between water limitation and facilitation has been one of the most contentious debates surrounding the stress-gradient hypothesis (SGH), which states that plant-plant interactions shift from competition to facilitation with increasing environmental stress. We take a closer look at the potential role of soil...
