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Decadal to centennial variations in sediment availability are a primary driver of coastal change within barrier systems. Models help explore how barrier morphology relates to past changes in magnitude of sediment availability, but this requires insights and validation from field efforts. In this study, we investigate the progradation of Anclote...

The Quaternary Clear Lake Volcanic Field (CLVF) in the Northern California Coast Range is the youngest of a string of northward-younging volcanic centers in the state. The CLVF is located within the broad San Andreas Transform Fault System and has been active intermittently for ∼2 million years. Heat beneath...

Freshwater mussels of the order Unionida are currently one of the most imperiled groups of organisms in the North American faunal region. Accurate risk assessments and development of effective management strategies for remaining populations require knowledge of thermal limits in the face of increasing surface water temperature...

Hierarchical conservation and management of Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) habitat may benefit from use of species distribution models. White-nose syndrome has caused additional declines for this endangered bat, requiring use of historical presence locations for habitat-related analy- ses. We created random forest presence/pseudo-absence models to assess the distribution and availability of...

Understanding walleye (Sander vitreus) spawning behavior is important for managing walleye fisheries, but such information is limited for Appalachian reservoirs. We assessed spawning movements and spawning locations for a reestablished walleye population in Cheat Lake, West Virginia. We tagged fifty-two walleye with acoustic telemetry transmitters to evaluate environmental correlates associated with...

The gray bat (Myotis grisescens) is a cave-obligate species that has been listed as federally endangered since 1976, following population declines from human disturbance at hibernation and maternity caves. However, with cave protection, most gray bat populations have increased. As part of a project examining bat use of transportation structures...

IntroductionFloods are one of the most frequent and expensive natural disasters that occur across the United States. Rapid, high-water events that occur in local areas—flash floods—are especially difficult for emergency managers to predict and provide advance warning to the public, and insufficient data can hamper postflood recovery efforts. Central Texas...

Coastal resources are increasingly affected by erosion, extreme weather events, sea level rise, tidal flooding, and other potential hazards related to climate change. These hazards have varying effects on coastal landscapes because of the compounding of geologic, oceanographic, ecologic, and socioeconomic factors that exist at a given location. An assessment...

Executive SummaryThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is considering changes to the management of water surface elevation in four lakes in the Mahoning River Basin. These changes would affect the timing and amounts of water released to the Mahoning River and could affect the water quality of those releases....

Bigheaded carp Hypophthalmichthys spp. are invasive species native to Asia expanding in the Mississippi River Basin in North America. An understanding of spatiotemporal distribution and aggregation of invasive carp is key to establishing when and where to focus surveillance designed to monitor expansion, and to managing harvest programs designed to...

Graphite Creek is an unusual flake graphite deposit located on the Seward Peninsula, Alaska, USA. We present field observations, uranium-lead (U–Pb) monazite and titanite geochronology, carbon (C) and sulfur (S) stable isotope geochemistry, and graphite Raman spectroscopy data from this deposit that support a new model of flake graphite ore...

Infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health and biodiversity. Yet, predicting the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife epizootics remains challenging. Disease outbreaks result from complex nonlinear interactions among a large collection of variables that rarely adhere to the assumptions of parametric regression modeling. We adopted a nonparametric machine learning...

Paleoclimate reconstructions can provide a window into the environmental conditions in Earth history when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher than today. In the eastern USA, paleoclimate reconstructions are sparse, because terrestrial sedimentary deposits are rare. Despite this, the eastern...

Fish that exhibit high foraging activity or bold behavior can be particularly vulnerable to angling. If these traits are heritable, selection through harvest can drive phenotypic change, eventually rendering a target population less vulnerable to angling and consequently impacting the quality of the fishery. In this...

Diet plasticity is a common behavior exhibited by piscivores to sustain predator biomass when preferred prey biomass is reduced. Invasive piscivore diet plasticity could complicate suppression success; thus, understanding invasive predator consumption is insightful to meeting conservation targets. Here, we determine if diet plasticity exists in...

To assess the status and trends of conditions of surface waters throughout Mississippi, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), summarized concentrations and estimated loads, yields, trends, and spatial and temporal patterns of total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) at 20 stream...

Coupled paleomagnetic and geochronologic data derived from mafic dykes provide valuable records of continental movement. To reconstruct the Proterozoic paleogeographic history of Peninsular India, we report paleomagnetic directions and U-Pb zircon ages from twenty-nine mafic dykes in the Eastern Dharwar Craton near Hyderabad. Paleomagnetic analysis yielded clusters...

Geospatial data and tools evolve as new technologies are developed and landscape change occurs over time. As a result, these data may become outdated and inadequate for supporting critical habitat-related work across the international boundary in the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts Bird Conservation Region (BCR 33) due to the...

Land management priorities and decisions may result in population declines for non-target wildlife species. In the western United States, large-scale removal of conifer from sagebrush ecosystems (Artemisia spp.) is occurring to recover greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) populations and may result in pinyon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) habitat loss. Jay populations have experienced...

While there is consensus that blue carbon ecosystems, such as mangroves, have an important role in mitigating some aspects of global climate change, little is known about mangrove carbon cycling under elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations (eCO2). Here, we review studies in order to identify pathways for how eCO2 might influence mangrove ecosystem carbon...

We determine optimal on‐fault earthquake spatial distributions using a combinatorial method that minimizes the long‐term cumulative stress resolved on the fault. An integer‐programming framework was previously developed to determine the optimal arrangement of a millennia‐scale earthquake sample that minimizes the misfit to a target slip rate determined from geodetic data....

The United States earthquake early warning (EEW) system, ShakeAlert®, currently employs two algorithms based on seismic data alone to characterize the earthquake source, reporting the weighted average of their magnitude estimates. Nonsaturating magnitude estimates derived in real time from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data using peak ground displacement (PGD)...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Macoupin County Soil and Water Conservation District and the American Farmland Trust, undertook a monitoring effort from 2017 to 2021 in the upper Macoupin Creek watershed. The monitoring effort was to determine and characterize nitrogen, phosphorus, and suspended-sediment concentrations, loads, and yields...

Changes in climate and land-use and land-cover (LULC) are expected to influence surface water runoff and nutrient characteristics of estuarine watersheds, but the extent to which estuaries are vulnerable to altered nutrient loading under future conditions is poorly understood. The present work aims to address this gap...

Understanding plant community response to environmental change is a crucial aspect of biological conservation and restoration, but species-based approaches are limited in that they do not reveal the underlying mechanisms driving vegetation dynamics. An understanding of trait-environment relationships is particularly important in the case of invasive...