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The photograph of a young boy poised to capture a wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) on page 3 of Amphibians and Reptiles in Minnesota captures perfectly the sense of awe and wonderment that one encounters throughout John Moriarty and Carol Hall’s new book. This is a spirit that most children possess...

Discontinuous structure in landscapes may cause discontinuous, aggregated species body-mass patterns, reflecting the scales of structure available to animal communities within a landscape. Empirical analyses have shown that the location of species within body mass aggregations, which reflect this scale-specific organization, is non-random with regard to several ecological phenomena, including...

Freshwater ecosystems are important for global biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services. There is consensus in the scientific literature that freshwater ecosystems are vulnerable to the impacts of environmental change, which may trigger irreversible regime shifts upon which biodiversity and ecosystem services may be lost. There are profound uncertainties regarding...

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is responsible for protecting and managing the natural resources and heritage on almost 20% of the land in the United States. The DOI’s mission requires access to remotely sensed data over vast lands, including areas that are remote and potentially dangerous to access....

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) influences the physical, chemical, and biological properties of aquatic ecosystems. We hypothesized that controls over spatial variation in DOM quantity and composition (measured with DOM optical properties) differ based on the source of DOM to aquatic ecosystems. DOM quantity and composition should be better predicted by...

Although arid and semiarid regions are defined by low precipitation, the seasonal timing of temperature and precipitation can influence net primary production and plant functional type composition. The importance of precipitation seasonality is evident in semiarid areas of the western U.S., which comprise the Intermountain (IM) zone, a region that...

The “2800’ sandstone” of the Olla oil field is an oil and gas-producing reservoir in a coal-bearing interval of the Paleocene–Eocene Wilcox Group in north-central Louisiana, USA. In the 1980s, this producing unit was flooded with CO2 in an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project, leaving ∼30% of the injected CO2 in the...

East Diamante is a submarine volcano in the southern Mariana arc that is host to a complex caldera ~5 × 10 km (elongated ENE-WSW) that is breached along its northern and southwestern sectors. A large field of barite-sulfide mounds was discovered in June 2009 and revisited in July 2010 with...

The federally endangered Tar River spinymussel (Elliptio steinstansana) is endemic to the Tar River and Neuse River systems in North Carolina. The extent to which water quality limits Tar River spinymussels’ recovery is important to establish, and one aspect of that is understanding the species’ pollutant sensitivity. The primary objectives...

To better understand the composition of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in landfill leachate, fresh leachate from 19 landfills was sampled across the United States during 2011. The sampled network included 12 municipal and 7 private landfills with varying landfill waste compositions, geographic and climatic settings, ages of waste, waste...

We present an analysis of SO2 column densities derived from GOME-2 satellite measurements for the Kīlauea volcano (Hawai`i) for 2007–2012. During a period of enhanced degassing activity in March–November 2008, monthly mean SO2 emission rates and effective SO2 lifetimes are determined simultaneously from the observed downwind plume evolution and meteorological wind fields, without...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Engineering Risk Assessment Project has developed the Seismic Risk Web Application to combine earthquake hazard and structural fragility information in order to calculate the risk of earthquake damage to structures. Enabling users to incorporate their own hazard and fragility information into the calculations will make...

Observations and sea surface temperature (SST)-forced ECHAM5 simulations are examined to study the seasonal cycle of eastern Africa rainfall and its SST sensitivity during 1979–2012, focusing on interannual variability and trends. The eastern Horn is drier than the rest of equatorial Africa, with two distinct wet seasons, and whereas the...

Augustine Volcano, a frequently active andesitic island stratocone, erupted a late Pleistocene rhyolite pumice fall that is temporally linked through zircon geochronology to cumulate dioritic blocks brought to the surface in Augustine's 2006 eruption. Zircon from the rhyolite yield a 238U-230Th age of ∼25 ka for their unpolished rims, and their...

The quantification of heat and mass flow between deep reservoirs and the surface is important for understanding magmatic and hydrothermal systems. Here, we use high-resolution measurement of carbon dioxide flux (φCO2) and heat flow at the surface to characterize the mass (CO2 and steam) and heat released to the atmosphere from...

No abstract available....

This study quantitatively explores whether land cover changes have a substantive impact on simulated streamflow within the tropical island setting of Puerto Rico. The Precipitation Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) was used to compare streamflow simulations based on five static parameterizations of land cover with those based on dynamically varying parameters...

I review the primary literature to ascertain the status of amphibian monitoring efforts in the southeastern USA, a “hotspot” for biodiversity in North America. This effort revealed taxonomic, geographic and ecological disparities in studies of amphibian populations in this region. Of the species of anurans and caudates known to occur...

In this, the second of a pair of papers on the statistical signatures of riverbed sediment in high-frequency acoustic backscatter, spatially explicit maps of the stochastic geometries (length- and amplitude-scales) of backscatter are related to patches of riverbed surfaces composed of known sediment types, as determined by geo-referenced underwater video...

A fundamental goal of wetland restoration is to reinstate pre-disturbance hydrological conditions to degraded landscapes, facilitating recolonization by native species and the production of resilient, functional ecosystems. To evaluate restoration success, baseline conditions need to be determined and a reference target needs to be established that will serve as an...

The Pacific Rim is a region where tectonic processes play a significant role in coastal landscape evolution. Coastal California, on the eastern margin of the Pacific Rm, is very active tectonically and geomorphic expressions of this include uplifted marine terraces. There have been, however, conflicting estimates of the rate of...

Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) established and funded the Migratory Bird Habitat Initiative (MBHI), with the goal of improving and increasing wetland habitats on private lands to benefit wintering and migrating waterbirds displaced from...

Ecosystems provide life-sustaining services upon which human civilization depends, but their degradation largely continues unabated. Spatially explicit information on ecosystem services (ES) provision is required to better guide decision making, particularly for mountain systems, which are characterized by vertical gradients and isolation with high topographic complexity, making them particularly sensitive...

Often less expensive and less invasive than conventional mark–recapture, so-called 'mark-resight' methods are popular in the estimation of population abundance. These methods are most often applied when a subset of the population of interest is marked (naturally or artificially), and non-invasive sighting data can be simultaneously collected...

Geomorphological Fieldwork addresses a topic that always remains popular within the geosciences and environmental science. More specifically, the volume conveys a growing legacy of field-based learning for young geomorphologists that can be used as a student book for field-based university courses and postgraduate research requiring fieldwork or field schools. The...