Representing 3-dimensional fuels for physics-based fire behavior models: A general framework and case study in a type-converted post-fire shrubfield
Niko Tutland, Andreas Paul Wion, Carolina Jasmine May, Grant C. Hutchings, Hope Nowak, James R. Gattiker, J. Kevin Hiers, Rodman R. Linn, Scott M. Pokswinski, Ellis Margolis
2025, Fire Ecology (21)
Background Physics-based three-dimensional (3D) fire behavior models improve planning for prescribed fire application and wildfire mitigation, but require high spatial resolution 3D fuel models as inputs. While multiple methods and data sources for realistically representing 3D, heterogeneous fuels are available, no unifying framework exists to guide the use of these...
Decision-support modeling and research priorities for establishing baseline conditions for outstandingly remarkable values, Obed Wild and Scenic River, Tennessee
Elena R. Crowley-Ornelas, Rebecca Schapansky, Tom Blount, Niki S. Nicholas
2025, Open-File Report 2025-1035
The Obed River is the last undammed river in Tennessee. The Obed Wild and Scenic River is managed by the National Park Service and covers a protected area of the Obed River headwaters (including four contributing tributaries). The Obed Wild and Scenic River supports a unique ecosystem with eight federally...
Hydrologic budgets and water availability of six bedrock aquifers in the Black Hills area, South Dakota and Wyoming, 1931–2022
Colton J. Medler, Todd M. Anderson, William G. Eldridge
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2025-5067
Population growth and recurring droughts in the Black Hills region raised interest in water resources and future availability. The Black Hills hydrology study (BHHS) was initiated in the early 1990s to address questions regarding water resources. Since completion of the BHHS in the early 2000s, the population of the Black...
The 3D Elevation Program—Supporting Tennessee’s economy
George Heleine
2025, Fact Sheet 2025-3037
Introduction The State of Tennessee has an area of approximately 42,100 square miles and includes six physiographic regions: Blue Ridge, Valley and Ridge, Appalachian Plateaus, Highland Rim, Nashville Basin, and the Gulf Coastal Plains. Up-to-date elevation data support key activities across the State, such as economic development, infrastructure and construction management,...
Stable isotope reference materials and scale definitions – Outcomes of the 2024 IAEA experts meeting
Federica Camin, Dinka Besic, Paul J. Brewer, Colin E Allison, Tyler B. Coplen, Philip J.H. Dunn, Matthias Gehre, Manfred Gröning, Harro A.J. Meijer, Jean-François Hélie, Paola Iacumin, Rebecca Kraft, Bor Krajnc, Steffen Kümmel, Sangil Lee, Juris Meija, Zoltan Mester, Joachim Mohn, Heiko Moossen, Haiping Qi, Grzegorz Skrzypek, Peter Sperlich, Joelle Viallon, Leonard I. Wassenaar, Robert I. Wielgosz
2025, Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (39)
The participants of the 12th International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting on stable isotope reference materials reached a consensus, acknowledging the existence and use of two carbon isotope delta scales: the VPDB (Vienna Peedee belemnite) scale and the VPDB-LSVEC (LSVEC - lithium carbonate prepared by H. J. Svec). Conversion models between...
Reaction kinetics and accelerant effects of sulfides in early mature hydrocarbon generation using hydrous pyrolysis
Tushar Adsul, Paul C. Hackley, Javin J. Hatcherian, Ryan J. McAleer, Carlin J. Green, Alan K. Burnham, Santanu Ghosh, Josef P. Werne, Atul K. Varma
2025, Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis (192)
Hydrocarbon generation in organic-rich sediments is influenced by the molecular organic composition and relative abundance of associated minerals. Certain mineral-derived elements act as catalysts and reaction intermediaries, facilitating early-stage hydrocarbon formation in potential source rocks. This study investigated the role of sulfur contributed from pyrite as an accelerant in thermal...
Climate and land use drivers of freshwater fish biodiversity in the northeastern United States
Jennifer B. Rogers, Graziella Vittoria DiRenzo, Rebecca M. Quiñones, Todd Richards, Allison H. Roy
2025, Biological Conservation (310)
Freshwater habitats can sustain high biodiversity, but habitat degradation, species invasion, and overexploitation have imperiled freshwater species. The multiple threats to freshwater habitats and changing stream characteristics due to climate change make it challenging to identify the drivers of fish vulnerability, especially given that the importance of drivers may vary...
Rapid Holocene deposition in the Mackenzie Trough and Barrow Canyon areas in the western Arctic Ocean
Masanobu Yamamoto, Kenta Suzuki, Masafumi Murayama, Laura Gemery, Koji Seike, Leonid Polyak, Young Jin Joe, Shoma Uchida, Minoru Kobayashi, J. Onodera, Keiji Horikawa, Yuhji Yamamoto, Takayuki Omori, Michinobu Kuwae, Tomohisa Irino, Yutaka Watanabe, Motoyo Itoh, Eiji Watanabe
2025, Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (12)
The Arctic Ocean and terrestrial environment have recently been reported to be changing drastically, but it is unclear whether these changes are similar to natural variations in the past or how sudden and large the changes are compared to natural variations. This premise served as motivation to collect sediment cores...
Arctic fold-and-thrust belts
Sergey S. Drachev, Andrey K. Khudoley, Iwona Klonowska, Jaroslaw Majka, Thomas E. Moore, Karsten Piepjohn, Andrey V. Prokopiev
2025, Book chapter, Geological Society of London Memoir
The modern Arctic has been formed through a series of continent–continent collisions, accretion of terranes and phases of crustal extension. The Neoproterozoic Timanian, Paleozoic Caledonian and Uralian, and late Mesozoic Verkhoyansk–Kolyma, Chukotkan and Brookian orogenies formed several large fold-and-thrust belts (FTBs). The FTBs are exposed across vast areas of continents...
Dietary bioavailability of uranium to a model freshwater invertebrate
Marie Noele Croteau, Christopher C. Fuller, Daniel J. Cain, Kate M. Campbell
2025, Environmental Science and Technology (59) 16641-16651
Uranium (U) mining increases environmental exposures. Understanding how U is taken up by organisms can aid in evaluating the potential for bioaccumulation and toxicity. Although the importance of aqueous geochemical speciation is well recognized for U bioavailability after dissolved exposures, far less is known about the processes controlling U bioavailability...
Contributions of erosion, deposition, and human activities to a change in sand storage in the bed of San Francisco Bay, California, 1980s to 2010s
Theresa A. Fregoso, Bruce E. Jaffe, Amy C. Foxgrover, Donald L. Woodrow, Bethany Kharrazi, Kevin Orzech
2025, Open-File Report 2025-1022
This study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides estimates of the change in sand storage in bed sediments from the 1980s to 2010s in the San Francisco Bay area, California. The study is part of a larger project called “Research to Understand Impacts of Bay Sand Mining on Sand...
Valuing recreational fishing using creel survey statistics
Luke Boehm, Richard T. Melstrom, Kevin L. Pope
2025, Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (4) 378-390
Recreation demand analysis has relied on mail and internet surveys to collect information on individual recreators. However, conducting these surveys is costly and time-consuming. Alternative sources that report aggregate visitation may go unused due to a lack of information about trip starting points. We set up and solve a system...
The conundrum of taxonomic uniformitarianism in planktic foraminifera
Harry J. Dowsett, Marci M. Robinson, Kevin M. Foley, Whittney Spivey
2025, Palaeontology (68)
Planktic foraminiferal species distributions in the modern ocean track environmental features like sea surface temperature (SST). Species shift their distributions as the marine environment changes, providing an analogue for past behaviour. Stationarity of species' ecological tolerances is therefore a first-order assumption of all palaeoenvironmental reconstructions based upon modern analogue methods....
Real-time oil spill concentration assessment through fluorescence imaging and deep learning
Biplab Poudel, Jiacheng Xie, Congyu Guo, Olivia Watt, Erin L. Pulster, Rishi J. Patel, Jeffery A. Steevens, Dong Xu
2025, Journal of Hazardous Materials (496)
Oil spills may pose severe ecological and socioeconomic threats, necessitating rapid and accurate environmental assessment. Traditional assessment methods used to determine the extent of a spill including gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, satellite imaging, and visual surveys, are often time-consuming, expensive, and limited by weather conditions or sampling constraints. Furthermore, these methods...
Reflections on a trio of North American earthquakes in 1925
Susan E. Hough, Maurice Lamontagne, John E. Ebel, L. Baise
2025, Seismological Research Letters (97) 548-563
In 1925, three moderately large damaging earthquakes occurred in North America over four months: the 28 February (local time; LT) M 6.2 Charlevoix, 27 June (LT) M 6.6 Montana, and 29 June M 6.5 Santa Barbara earthquakes. The centennial anniversaries of these events motivated this retrospective consideration focused on the ground motions generated by the three...
The impact of the May 1921 superstorm on American telecommunication systems
Jeffrey J. Love, Greg M. Lucas, Anna Kelbert, Neesha R. Schnepf, Paul A. Bedrosian, Sara K. McBride
2025, Space Weather (23)
A compilation is presented of impacts (interference and damage) realized on long-line telegraph and telephone systems across North America during the 13-16 May 1921 magnetic storm. Impacts occurred primarily during local nighttime, after the third of four sudden commencements, and during the storm’s most-prominent main phase. Impacts are attributed to rapid and high-amplitude geomagnetic...
Benchmarking shoreline prediction models over multi-decadal timescales
Yongjing Mao, Giovanni Coco, Sean Vitousek, Jose A. A. Antolinez, Georgios Azorakos, Masayuki Banno, Clément Bouvier, Karin R. Bryan, Laura Cagigal, Kit Calcraft, Bruno Castelle, Xinyu Chen, Maurizio D'Anna, Lucas de Freitas Pereira, Iñaki de Santiago, Aditya N. Deshmukh, Bixuan Dong, Ahmed Elghandour, Amirmahdi Gohari, Eduardo Gomez-de la Peña, Mitchell D. Harley, Michael Ibrahim, Déborah Idier, Camilo Jaramillo Cardona, Changbin Lim, Ivana Mingo, Julian O'Grady, Daniel Pais, Oxana Repina, Arthur Robinet, Dano Roelvink, Joshua Simmons, Erdinc Sogut, Katie Wilson, Kristen Splinter
2025, Communications Earth & Environment (6)
Robust predictions of shoreline change are critical for sustainable coastal management. Despite advancements in shoreline models, objective benchmarking remains limited. Here we present results from ShoreShop2.0, an international collaborative benchmarking workshop, where 34 groups submitted shoreline change predictions in a blind competition. Subsets of shoreline observations at an undisclosed site...
Spatially explicit demographics of Mojave Desert Tortoises on a demography plot in California, USA
Sarah Doyle, Sean M. Murphy, K. Kristina Drake, Julie Hendrix, Todd C. Esque
2025, Herpetologica (81) 215-223
Obtaining reliable estimates of demographic parameters is critical to effective wildlife conservation and management. Densities of Mojave Desert Tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) were historically derived from capture–mark–recapture surveys on small, often strategically placed demography plots, or demographic study areas, that also provided information on demographic composition and vital rates. After protection...
Advancing the implementation of coastal restoration in Louisiana through a co-production of science framework
Jacob M. Oster, Jessica R. Henkel, Alyssa Dausman, Eva D. Windhoffer, Bingqing Liu, Melissa Millman Baustian, Denise Reed, Summer Langlois, David C. Lindquist
2025, Estuaries and Coasts (48)
Coastal Louisiana faces complex challenges from the compounding effects of coastal land loss and climate change. The State of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and the RESTORE Act Center of Excellence for Louisiana (LA-COE) have adopted a co-production of science framework to help ensure that scientific research funded...
The pre-maria geologic history of the Imbrium basin preserved by remnant highlands massifs
Ben D. Byron, Catherine M. Elder, Lori M. Pigue, Jean-Pierre Williams
2025, JGR Planets (130)
The Imbrium basin is one of the largest and youngest impact basins on the Moon. It has experienced multiple phases of volcanism that filled the basin with basaltic lavas, obscuring most evidence of geologic activity prior to the emplacement of mare basalts. Elevated basin ring massifs, however, can retain some...
Rupture process of the Mw7.0 December 5, 2024 Offshore Cape Mendocino earthquake
Frederick Pollitz, Katherine Anna Guns, Clara Yoon
2025, Geophysical Research Letters (52)
The Mw7.0 December 5, 2024 Offshore Cape Mendocino earthquake ruptured a km long portion of the east-west trending Mendocino fault zone (MFZ). In order to clarify the rupture process, we assemble three-component seismograms from regional seismic stations, horizontal coseismic displacement vectors derived from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time series, and...
Mapping global coral vulnerability to stony coral tissue loss disease: Implications for biosecurity and conservation
Kevin D. Lafferty, Giovanni Strona
2025, Frontiers in Marine Science (12)
Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) has devastated Caribbean coral reefs since 2014, but its potential for global impact remains uncertain. We developed predictive models to assess the worldwide vulnerability of coral reefs to SCTLD under different origin and spread hypotheses. Using random forest regression models incorporating coral taxonomy and...
Bright spots for advancing ecological understanding and conservation decision-making
Holly Susan Embke, Zachary S. Feiner, Gretchen Hansen, Daniel A. Isermann, Olaf P. Jensen, Christopher I. Rounds, Quinn Smith, M. Jake Vander Zanden
2025, Conservation Biology (39)
A lot can be learned by studying bright spots—defined as unexpected positive outcomes. In fields like public health, education, and oncology, identifying factors behind bright spots reveals previously unknown drivers of success that can be replicated elsewhere. This concept is being applied in conservation but is hampered by variations in...
The 3D National Topography Model Call for Action—Part 2: The Next Generation 3D Elevation Program
Vicki Lukas, Larry Sugarbaker, Cindy A. Thatcher, Allyson L. Jason, Jason M. Stoker
2025, Circular 1553
The three-dimensional (3D) National Topography Model initiative to integrate elevation and hydrography data includes the next generation of hydrography data from the 3D Hydrography Program and the next generation of elevation data from the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP). The first-ever collection of light detection and ranging (lidar) data for the...
Ecological acclimation: A framework to integrate fast and slow responses to climate change
Michael Stemkovski, Joey Bernhardt, Benjamin Wong Blonder, John B. Bradford, Kyra Clark-Wolf, Laura E. Dee, Margaret Evans, Virginia Iglesias, Loretta Johnson, Abigail J. Lynch, Sparkle Malone, Brooke Osborne, Melissa Pastore, Michael Paterson, Malin Pinsky, Christine R. Rollinson, Oliver Selmoni, Jason Venkiteswarnan, Anthony P. Walker, Nicole K. Ward, John B. Williams, Claire Zarakas, Peter B. Adler
2025, Functional Ecology (39) 1923-1939
Ecological responses to climate change occur across vastly different time-scales, from minutes for physiological plasticity to decades or centuries for community turnover and evolutionary adaptation. Accurately predicting the range of ecosystem trajectories will require models that incorporate both fast processes that may keep pace with climate change and slower...
