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The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Town of Framingham, Massachusetts, has investigated the potential of proposed groundwater withdrawals at the Birch Road well site to affect nearby surface water bodies and wetlands, including Lake Cochituate, the Sudbury River, and the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in east-central Massachusetts....

Serpentine Hot Springs is the most visited site in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. The hot springs have traditionally been used by the Native people of the Seward Peninsula for religious, medicinal and spiritual purposes and continue to be used in many of the same ways by Native people...

Numerous geochemical and geophysical studies have been conducted at Yellowstone National Park to better understand the hydrogeologic processes supporting the thermal features of the Park. This report provides the first 87Sr/86Sr and 234U/238U data for thermal water from the Upper Geyser Basin (UGB) intended to evaluate whether heavy radiogenic isotopes...

A group of thunderstorms produced >4 in of rain during four periods of progressively more intense rainfall across a small part of a relatively high-elevation area of the northern Black Hills on 5 August 2014. The resulting hydrologic response was noteworthy in two very small headwater drainage basins, where the...

Decision-support tools providing accurate, near-real-time data and user-friendly interactive visualizations are of critical value to resource managers tasked with planning and carrying out management programs in their domain. Creating a system to continuously aggregate datasets and recompute derived values is difficult and error-prone when attempted by hand. To address this...

Potentiometric surfaces for Paleozoic strata, based on water well levels and selected drill-stem tests, reveal the control on hydraulic head exerted by outcrops in eastern Kansas and Oklahoma. From outcrop in the east, the westward climb of hydraulic head is much less than that of the land surface, with heads...

Woodland ponds are important landscape features that help sustain populations of amphibians that require this aquatic habitat for successful reproduction. Species abundance patterns often reflect site-specific differences in hydrology, physical characteristics, and surrounding vegetation. Large-scale processes such as changing land cover and environmental conditions are other potential drivers influencing amphibian...

Lake eutrophication is a large and growing problem in many parts of the world, commonly due to anthropogenic sources of nutrients. Improved quantification of nutrient inputs is required to address this problem, including better determination of exchanges between groundwater and lakes. This first of a two-part review provides a brief history of...

We reviewed the published and gray literature associated with Neosho Smallmouth Bass and the genetically-distinct Ouachita lineage. Substantial inter-stream variation appears to occur among these populations, particularly related to age. The Neosho subspecies is more abundant, grows faster, and lives longer than the genetically-distinct Ouachita lineage. Recruitment is highly variable...

We measured rates of sediment, C, N, and P accumulation at four floodplain sites spanning the nontidal through oligohaline Choptank and Pocomoke Rivers, Maryland, USA. Ceramic tiles were used to collect sediment for a year and sediment cores were collected to derive decadal sedimentation rates using 137Cs. The results showed...

In 1996, at the request of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a team of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists produced a strategic plan for the acquisition, improvement and modernization of multidisciplinary sets of data to support the growth of the Mauritanian minerals sector and to highlight the...

Process-based models are widely used for rainfall-induced shallow landslide forecasting. Previous studies have successfully applied the U.S. Geological Survey’s Transient Rainfall Infiltration and Grid-Based Regional Slope-Stability (TRIGRS) model (Baum et al. 2002) to compute infiltration-driven changes in the hillslopes’ factor of safety on small scales (i.e., tens of square...

Geographically isolated wetlands (GIWs), those surrounded by uplands, exchange materials, energy, and organisms with other elements in hydrological and habitat networks, contributing to landscape functions, such as flow generation, nutrient and sediment retention, and biodiversity support. GIWs constitute most of the wetlands in many North American landscapes, provide a disproportionately...

Knowledge of the magnitude and frequency of low flows in streams, which are flows in a stream during prolonged dry weather, is fundamental for water-supply planning and design; waste-load allocation; reservoir storage design; and maintenance of water quality and quantity for irrigation, recreation, and wildlife conservation. This report presents the...

Federal agencies that oversee land management for much of the Snake Range in eastern Nevada, including the management of Great Basin National Park by the National Park Service, need to understand the potential extent of adverse effects to federally managed lands from nearby groundwater development. As a result, this study...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, designed and operates a series of monitoring stations on streams and springs throughout Missouri known as the Ambient Water-Quality Monitoring Network. During the 2014 water year (October 1, 2013, through September 30, 2014), data were collected at...

This article presents the scientific rationale for an ambitious ICDP drilling project to continuously sample Late Cretaceous to modern sediment in four different sedimentary basins that transect the equatorial Amazon of Brazil, from the Andean foreland to the Atlantic Ocean. The goals of this project are to document the evolution...

Walker Lake is a threatened and federally protected desert terminal lake in western Nevada. To help protect the desert terminal lake and the surrounding watershed, the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Geological Survey have been studying the hydrology of the Walker River Basin in Nevada and California since 2004. Hydrologic...

This report describes an R package called smwrBase, which consists of a collection of functions to import, transform, manipulate, and manage hydrologic data within the R statistical environment. Functions in the package allow users to import surface-water and groundwater data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Information System database...

We used a statistical learning framework to evaluate the ability of three machine-learning methods to predict nitrate concentration in shallow groundwater of the Central Valley, California: boosted regression trees (BRT), artificial neural networks (ANN), and Bayesian networks (BN). Machine learning methods can learn complex patterns in the data but because...

Lake Houston, an important water resource for the Houston, Texas, area, receives inflows from seven major tributaries that compose the San Jacinto River Basin upstream from the reservoir. The effects of different inflows from the watersheds drained by these tributaries on the residence time of water in Lake Houston and...

The Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) dataset builds on previous approaches to ‘smart’ interpolation techniques and high resolution, long period of record precipitation estimates based on infrared Cold Cloud Duration (CCD) observations. The algorithm i) is built around a 0.05° climatology that incorporates satellite information to represent...

Previous studies by the U.S. Geological Survey identified Alkali Flat as an area of groundwater upwelling, with increases in concentrations of total dissolved solids, and streamflow loss, but additional study was needed to better characterize these observations. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management, White...

We use a dated sediment core from Lake Whittington (USA) in the lower Mississippi River to reconstruct linkages in the carbon cycling and fluvial sediment dynamics over the past 80 years. Organic carbon (OC) sources were characterized using bulk (δ13C, ramped pyrolysis-oxidation (PyrOx) 14C, δ15N, and TN:OC ratios) and compound-specific (lignin phenols...

Whether a waterway is temporary or permanent influences regulatory protection guidelines, however, classification can be subjective due to a combination of factors, including time of year, antecedent moisture conditions, and previous experience of the field investigator. Our objective was to develop a standardized protocol using publicly available spatial information to classify...