Reaction modeling of drainage quality in the Duluth Complex, northern Minnesota, USA
Robert R. Seal, Kim Lapakko, Nadine M. Piatak, Laurel G. Woodruff
2015, Conference Paper
Reaction modeling can be a valuable tool in predicting the long-term behavior of waste material if representative rate constants can be derived from long-term leaching tests or other approaches. Reaction modeling using the REACT program of the Geochemist’s Workbench was conducted to evaluate long-term drainage quality affected by disseminated Cu-Ni-(Co-)-PGM...
Composite Sunrise Butte pluton: Insights into Jurassic–Cretaceous collisional tectonics and magmatism in the Blue Mountains Province, northeastern Oregon
Kenneth H. Johnson, J.J. Schwartz, Jiri Zak, Krystof Verner, Calvin G. Barnes, Clay Walton, Joseph L. Wooden, James E. Wright, Ronald W. Kistler
2015, GSA Special Papers (513) 377-398
The composite Sunrise Butte pluton, in the central part of the Blue Mountains Province, northeastern Oregon, preserves a record of subduction-related magmatism, arc-arc collision, crustal thickening, and deep-crustal anatexis. The earliest phase of the pluton (Desolation Creek unit) was generated in a subduction zone environment, as the oceanic lithosphere between the...
Synoptic evaluation of scale-dependent metrics for hydrographic line feature geometry
Larry V. Stanislawski, Barbara P. Buttenfield, Paulo Raposo, Madeline Cameron, Jeff T. Falgout
2015, Conference Paper, 18th ICA Workshop on Generalisation and Multiple Representation
Methods of acquisition and feature simplification for vector feature data impact cartographic representations and scientific investigations of these data, and are therefore important considerations for geographic information science (Haunert and Sester 2008). After initial collection, linear features may be simplified to reduce excessive detail or to furnish a reduced-scale version...
Geochemical reanalysis of historical U.S. Geological Survey sediment samples from the Zane Hills, Hughes and Shungnak quadrangles, Alaska
Melanie B. Werdon, Matthew Granitto, Jaime S. Azain
2015, Report
The State of Alaska’s Strategic and Critical Minerals (SCM) Assessment project, a State-funded Capital Improvement Project (CIP), is designed to evaluate Alaska’s statewide potential for SCM resources. The SCM Assessment is being implemented by the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys (DGGS), and involves obtaining new airborne-geophysical, geological, and...
Potential role of acetyl-CoA synthetase (acs) and malate dehydrogenase (mae) in the evolution of the acetate switch in Bacteria and Archaea
Elliott P. Barnhart, Marcella A. McClure, Kiki Johnson, Sean Cleveland, Kristopher A. Hunt, Matthew W. Fields
2015, Scientific Reports (5) 1-10
Although many Archaea have AMP-Acs (acetyl-coenzyme A synthetase) and ADP-Acs, the extant methanogenic genus Methanosarcina is the only identified Archaeal genus that can utilize acetate via acetate kinase (Ack) and phosphotransacetylase (Pta). Despite the importance of ack as the potential urkinase in the ASKHA phosphotransferase superfamily, an origin hypothesis does...
Correspondence of biological condition models of California streams at statewide and regional scales
Jason T. May, Larry R. Brown, Andrew C. Rehn, Ian R. Waite, Peter R Ode, Raphael D Mazor, Kenneth C Schiff
2015, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (187)
We used boosted regression trees (BRT) to model stream biological condition as measured by benthic macroinvertebrate taxonomic completeness, the ratio of observed to expected (O/E) taxa. Models were developed with and without exclusion of rare taxa at a site. BRT models are robust, requiring few assumptions compared with traditional modeling...
Towards sustainable management of huntable migratory waterbirds in Europe
Jesper Madsen, Matthieu Guillemain, Szabolcs Nagy, Pierre Defos du Rau, Jean-Yves Mondain-Monval, Cy Griffin, James Henty Williams, Nils Bunnefeld, Alexandre Czajkowski, Richard Hearn, Andreas Grauer, Mikko Alhainen, Angus Middleton, Fred A. Johnson
2015, Report
The EU Birds Directive and the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement provide an adequate legal framework for sustainable management of migratory waterbird populations. The main shortcoming of both instruments is that it leaves harvest decisions of a shared resource to individual Member States and Contracting Parties without providing a shared information base...
Evidence for intercontinental parasite exchange through molecular detection and characterization of haematozoa in northern pintails (Anas acuta) sampled throughout the North Pacific Basin
Andrew M. Ramey, Joel A. Schmutz, John A. Reed, Go Fujita, Bradley D. Scotton, Bruce Casler, Joseph P. Fleskes, Kan Konishi, Kiyoshi Uchida, Michael J. Yabsley
2015, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife (4) 11-21
Empirical evidence supports wild birds as playing a role in the interhemispheric exchange of bacteria and viruses; however, data supporting the redistribution of parasites among continents are limited. In this study, the hypothesis that migratory birds contribute to the redistribution of parasites between continents was tested by sampling northern pintails...
Terrestrial Carbon Sequestration in National Parks: Values for the Conterminous United States
Leslie A. Richardson, Christopher Huber, Zhi-Liang Zhu, Lynne Koontz
2015, Natural Resource Report NPS/NRSS/EQD/NRR-2014/880
Lands managed by the National Park Service (NPS) provide a wide range of beneficial services to the American public. This study quantifies the ecosystem service value of carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems within NPS units in the conterminous United States for which data were available. Combining annual net carbon balance...
Wolves on the hunt: The behavior of wolves hunting wild prey
L. David Mech, Douglas W. Smith, Daniel R. MacNulty
2015, Book
The interactions between apex predators and their prey are some of the most awesome and meaningful in nature—displays of strength, endurance, and a deep coevolutionary history. And there is perhaps no apex predator more impressive and important in its hunting—or more infamous, more misjudged—than the wolf. Because of wolves’ habitat,...
Evaluation of statistical treatments of left-censored environmental data using coincident uncensored data sets. II. Group comparisons
Ronald C. Antweiler
2015, Environmental Science & Technology (49) 13439-13446
The main classes of statistical treatments that have been used to determine if two groups of censored environmental data arise from the same distribution are substitution methods, maximum likelihood (MLE) techniques, and nonparametric methods. These treatments along with using all instrument-generated data (IN), even those less than the detection limit,...
Inferring spatial and temporal behavioral patterns of free-ranging manatees using saltwater sensors of telemetry tags
Delma Nataly Castelblanco-Martinez, Benjamin Morales-Vela, Daniel H. Slone, Janneth Adriana Padilla-Saldivar, James P. Reid, Hector Abuid Hernandez-Arana
2015, Mammalian Biology (80) 21-30
Diving or respiratory behavior in aquatic mammals can be used as an indicator of physiological activity and consequently, to infer behavioral patterns. Five Antillean manatees, Trichechus manatus manatus, were captured in Chetumal Bay and tagged with GPS tracking devices. The radios were equipped with a micropower saltwater sensor (SWS), which...
Chronology and ecology of late Pleistocene megafauna in the northern Willamette Valley, Oregon
Daniel M. Gilmour, Virginia L. Butler, James E. O'Connor, Edward Byrd Davis, Brendan J. Culleton, Douglas J. Kennett, Gregory W. L. Hodgins
2015, Quaternary Research (83) 127-136
Since the mid-19th century, western Oregon's Willamette Valley has been a source of remains from a wide variety of extinct megafauna. Few of these have been previously described or dated, but new chronologic and isotopic analyses in conjunction with updated evaluations of stratigraphic context provide substantial new information on the...
Evaluating the use of side-scan sonar for detecting freshwater mussel beds in turbid river environments
Jarrod Powers, Shannon K. Brewer, James M. Long, Thomas Campbell
2015, Hydrobiologia (743) 127-137
Side-scan sonar is a valuable tool for mapping habitat features in many aquatic systems suggesting it may also be useful for locating sedentary biota. The objective of this study was to determine if side-scan sonar could be used to identify freshwater mussel (unionid) beds and the required environmental conditions. We...
Annual Report: 2014: Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC)
Linda A. Weir, P. Nanjappa, J.J. Apodaca, J. Williams
2015, Report
Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC) was established in 1999 to address the widespread declines, extinctions, and range reductions of amphibians and reptiles, with a focus on conservation of taxa and habitats in North America. Amphibians and reptiles are affected by a broad range of human activities, both as...
Using the Maxent program for species distribution modelling to assess invasion risk
Catherine S. Jarnevich, Nicholas E. Young
R.C Venette, editor(s)
2015, Book chapter, Pest Risk Modelling and Mapping for Invasive Alien Species
MAXENT is a software package used to relate known species occurrences to information describing the environment, such as climate, topography, anthropogenic features or soil data, and forecast the presence or absence of a species at unsampled locations. This particular method is one of the most popular species distribution modelling techniques...
Restricted spatial regression in practice: Geostatistical models, confounding, and robustness under model misspecification
Ephraim M. Hanks, Erin M. Schliep, Mevin Hooten, Jennifer A. Hoeting
2015, Environmetrics (26) 243-254
In spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs), covariates that are spatially smooth are often collinear with spatially smooth random effects. This phenomenon is known as spatial confounding and has been studied primarily in the case where the spatial support of the process being studied is discrete (e.g., areal spatial data)....
Accounting for imperfect detection in Hill numbers for biodiversity studies
Kristin M. Broms, Mevin Hooten, Ryan M. Fitzpatrick
2015, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (6) 99-108
Hill numbers unify biodiversity metrics by combining several into one expression. For example, species richness, Shannon's diversity index and the Gini–Simpson index are a few of the most used diversity measures, and they can be expressed as Hill numbers. Traditionally, Hill numbers have been calculated from relative...
Flood trends: Not higher but more often
Robert M. Hirsch, Stacey A. Archfield
2015, Nature Climate Change (5) 198-199
Heavy precipitation has increased worldwide, but the effect of this on flood magnitude has been difficult to pinpoint. An alternative approach to analysing records shows that, in the central United States, floods have become more frequent but not larger....
Lahars at Cotopaxi and Tungurahua Volcanoes, Ecuador: Highlights from stratigraphy and observational records and related downstream hazards
Patricia A Mothes, James W. Vallance
2015, Book chapter, Volcanic hazards, risks and disasters
Lahars are volcanic debris flows that are dubbed primary when triggered by eruptive activity or secondary when triggered by other factors such as heavy rainfall after eruptive activity has waned. Variation in time and space of the proportion of sediment to water within a lahar dictates lahar flow phase and...
Vegetation composition, nutrient, and sediment dynamics along a floodplain landscape
Nancy B. Rybicki, Gregory E. Noe, Cliff R. Hupp, Myles Robinson
2015, River Systems (21) 109-123
Forested floodplains are important landscape features for retaining river nutrients and sediment loads but there is uncertainty in how vegetation influences nutrient and sediment retention. In order to understand the role of vegetation in nutrient and sediment trapping, we quantified species composition and the uptake of nutrients in plant material...
High‐resolution trench photomosaics from image‐based modeling: Workflow and error analysis
Nadine G. Reitman, Scott E.K. Bennett, Ryan D. Gold, Richard W. Briggs, Christopher DuRoss
2015, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (105) 2354-2366
Photomosaics are commonly used to construct maps of paleoseismic trench exposures, but the conventional process of manually using image‐editing software is time consuming and produces undesirable artifacts and distortions. Herein, we document and evaluate the application of image‐based modeling (IBM) for creating photomosaics and 3D models of paleoseismic trench exposures,...
Drought monitoring and assessment: Remote sensing and modeling approaches for the Famine Early Warning Systems Network
Gabriel B. Senay, Naga Manohar Velpuri, Stefanie Bohms, Michael Budde, Claudia Young, James Rowland, James Verdin
2015, Book chapter
Drought monitoring is an essential component of drought risk management. It is usually carried out using drought indices/indicators that are continuous functions of rainfall and other hydrometeorological variables. This chapter presents a few examples of how remote sensing and hydrologic modeling techniques are being used to generate a suite of...
Determination of (4-methylcyclohexyl)methanol isomers by heated purge-and-trap GC/MS in water samples from the 2014 Elk River, West Virginia, chemical spill
William T. Foreman, Donna L. Rose, Douglas B. Chambers, Angela S. Crain, Lucinda K. Murtagh, Haresh Thakellapalli, Kung K. Wang
2015, Chemosphere (131) 217-224
A heated purge-and-trap gas chromatography/mass spectrometry method was used to determine the cis- and trans-isomers of (4-methylcyclohexyl)methanol (4-MCHM), the reported major component of the Crude MCHM/Dowanol™ PPh glycol ether material spilled into the Elk River upriver from Charleston, West Virginia, on January 9, 2014. The trans-isomer eluted first and method...
Reticulite‐producing fountains from ring fractures in Kīlauea Caldera ca. 1500 CE
Michael May, Rebecca J. Carey, Don Swanson, Bruce F. Houghton
Rebecca Carey, Valerie Cayol, Michael P. Poland, Dominique Weis, editor(s)
2015, Book chapter, Hawaiian volcanoes: From source to surface
A widely dispersed reticulite bed occurs close to the base of the Keanakākoʻi Tephra at Kīlauea Volcano. It can be divided into six subunits in the northern sector of the volcano; the reticulite also occurs in the southern sector, but outcrops are sparse owing to penecontemporaneous erosion and burial. Multilobate isopachs for...
