Enhancements to the Mississippi Embayment Regional Aquifer Study (MERAS) groundwater-flow model and simulations of sustainable water-level scenarios
Brian R. Clark, Drew A. Westerman, D. Todd Fugitt
2013, Scientific Investigations Report 2013-5161
Arkansas continues to be one of the largest users of groundwater in the Nation. As such, long-term planning and management are essential to ensure continued availability of groundwater and surface water for years to come. The Mississippi Embayment Regional Aquifer Study (MERAS) model was developed previously as a tool to...
Use of multi-node wells in the Groundwater-Management Process of MODFLOW-2005 (GWM-2005)
David P. Ahlfeld, Paul M. Barlow
2013, Techniques and Methods 6-A47
Many groundwater wells are open to multiple aquifers or to multiple intervals within a single aquifer. These types of wells can be represented in numerical simulations of groundwater flow by use of the Multi-Node Well (MNW) Packages developed for the U.S. Geological Survey’s MODFLOW model. However, previous versions of the...
Distribution and abundance of freshwater polychaetes, Manayunkia speciosa (Polychaeta), in the Great Lakes with a 70-year case history for western Lake Erie
Don W. Schloesser
2013, Journal of Great Lakes Research (39) 308-316
Manayunkia speciosa has been a taxonomic curiosity for 150 years with little interest until 1977 when it was identified as an intermediate host of a fish parasite (Ceratomyxa shasta) responsible for fish mortalities (e.g., chinook salmon). Manayunkia was first reported in the Great Lakes in 1929. Since its discovery, the...
Water-quality and related aquatic biological characterization of Fish Creek, Teton County, Wyoming, 2007-2011
Cheryl A. Eddy-Miller, Jerrod D. Wheeler, David A. Peterson, Daniel J. Leemon
2013, Fact Sheet 2013-3036
Fish Creek, in western Wyoming near the town of Wilson, is a key feature in the area because it is used for irrigation, fishing, and other recreation, and adds scenic value to properties it runs through. Public concern about nuisance growths of aquatic plants in Fish Creek has been increasing...
Characterization of water quality and biological communities, Fish Creek, Teton County, Wyoming, 2007-2011
Cheryl A. Eddy-Miller, David A. Peterson, Jerrod D. Wheeler, C. Scott Edmiston, Michelle L. Taylor, Daniel J. Leemon
2013, Scientific Investigations Report 2013-5117
Fish Creek, an approximately 25-kilometer-long tributary to Snake River, is located in Teton County in western Wyoming near the town of Wilson. Fish Creek is an important water body because it is used for irrigation, fishing, and recreation and adds scenic value to the Jackson Hole properties it runs through....
Plant responses, climate pivot points, and trade-offs in water-limited ecosystems
Seth M. Munson
2013, Ecosphere (4)
Plant species in dryland ecosystems are limited by water availability and may be vulnerable to increases in aridity. Methods are needed to monitor and assess the rate of change in plant abundance and composition in relation to climate, understand the potential for degradation in dryland ecosystems, and forecast future changes...
Estimation of sediment inflows to Lake Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2009-11
K.G. Lee
2013, Scientific Investigations Report 2013-5152
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the City of Tuscaloosa, evaluated the concentrations, loads, and yields of suspended sediment in the tributaries to Lake Tuscaloosa in west-central Alabama, from October 1, 2008, to January 31, 2012. The collection and analysis of these data will facilitate the comparison with historical...
A hybrid double-observer sightability model for aerial surveys
Paul C. Griffin, Bruce C. Lubow, Kurt J. Jenkins, David J. Vales, Barbara J. Moeller, Mason Reid, Patricia J. Happe, Scott M. Mccorquodale, Michelle J. Tirhi, Jim P. Schaberi, Katherine Beirne
2013, Journal of Wildlife Management (77) 1532-1544
Raw counts from aerial surveys make no correction for undetected animals and provide no estimate of precision with which to judge the utility of the counts. Sightability modeling and double-observer (DO) modeling are 2 commonly used approaches to account for detection bias and to estimate precision in aerial surveys. We...
Geospatial compilation of historical water-level altitudes in the Chicot and Evangeline aquifers 1977-2013 and Jasper aquifer 2000-13 in the Gulf Coast aquifer system, Houston-Galveston Region, Texas
Michaela R. Johnson, Robert H.H. Ellis
2013, Data Series 793
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Harris-Galveston Subsidence District, City of Houston, Fort Bend Subsidence District, Lone Star Groundwater Conservation District, and Brazoria County Groundwater Conservation District has produced a series of annual reports depicting groundwater-level altitudes in the Chicot, Evangeline, and Jasper aquifers of the Gulf...
Evaluating changes to reservoir rule curves using historical water-level data
Ethan Mower, Leandro E. Miranda
2013, International Journal of River Basin Management (11) 323-328
Flood control reservoirs are typically managed through rule curves (i.e. target water levels) which control the storage and release timing of flood waters. Changes to rule curves are often contemplated and requested by various user groups and management agencies with no information available about the actual flood risk of such...
Chemistry and age of groundwater in bedrock aquifers of the Piceance and Yellow Creek watersheds, Rio Blanco County, Colorado, 2010-12
P.B. McMahon, J.C. Thomas, A.G. Hunt
2013, Scientific Investigations Report 2013-5132
Fourteen monitoring wells completed in the Uinta and Green River Formations in the Piceance Creek and Yellow Creek watersheds in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, were sampled for chemical, isotopic, and groundwater-age tracers to provide information on the overall groundwater quality, the occurrence and distribution of chemicals that could be related...
Chemistry and age of groundwater in the Piceance structural basin, Rio Blanco county, Colorado, 2010-12
Peter B. McMahon, Judith C. Thomas, Andrew G. Hunt
2013, Fact Sheet 2013-3047
Fourteen monitoring wells were sampled by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management, to better understand the chemistry and age of groundwater in the Piceance structural basin in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, and how they may relate to the development of underlying natural-gas reservoirs. Natural...
Is exposure to cyanobacteria an environmental risk factor for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases?
Walter G. Bradley, Amy R. Borenstein, Lorene M. Nelson, Geoffrey A. Codd, Barry H. Rosen, Elijah W. Stommel, Paul Alan Cox
2013, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Frontotemporal Degeneration (14) 325-333
There is a broad scientific consensus that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is caused by gene-environment interactions. Mutations in genes underlying familial ALS (fALS) have been discovered in only 5–10% of the total population of ALS patients. Relatively little attention has been paid to environmental and lifestyle factors that may trigger...
Diel horizontal migration in streams: juvenile fish exploit spatial heterogeneity in thermal and trophic resources
Jonathan B. Armstrong, Daniel E. Schindler, Casey P. Ruff, Gabriel T. Brooks, Kale E. Bentley, Christian E. Torgersen
2013, Ecology (94) 2066-2075
Vertical heterogeneity in the physical characteristics of lakes and oceans is ecologically salient and exploited by a wide range of taxa through diel vertical migration to enhance their growth and survival. Whether analogous behaviors exploit horizontal habitat heterogeneity in streams is largely unknown. We investigated fish movement behavior at daily...
Identification of unrecognized tundra fire events on the north slope of Alaska
Benjamin M. Jones, Amy L. Breen, Benjamin V. Gaglioti, Daniel H. Mann, Adrian V. Rocha, Guido Grosse, Christopher D. Arp, Michael L. Kunz, Donald A. Walker
2013, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (118) 1334-1344
Characteristics of the natural fire regime are poorly resolved in the Arctic, even though fire may play an important role cycling carbon stored in tundra vegetation and soils to the atmosphere. In the course of studying vegetation and permafrost-terrain characteristics along a chronosequence of tundra burn sites from AD 1977,...
Response of cackling geese (Branta hutchinsii taverneri to spatial and temporal variation in production of crowberries on the Alaska Peninsula
Jerry W. Hupp, David E. Safine, Ryan M. Nielson
2013, Polar Biology (36) 1243-1255
Arctic geese often feed on berries during premigratory fattening. We hypothesized that during autumn staging on the Alaska Peninsula, the distribution of Taverne's cackling geese (Branta hutchinsii taverneri) would be correlated with spatial variation in crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) abundance. We also predicted that daily rates of fat increase among cackling...
Habitat quality and recruitment success of cui-ui in the Truckee River downstream of Marble Bluff Dam, Pyramid Lake, Nevada
G. Gary Scoppettone, Peter H. Rissler, J. Antonio Salgado, Beverly Harry
2013, Open-File Report 2013-1247
We compared cui-ui (Chasmistes cujus) recruitment from two reaches of the Truckee River with histories of severe erosional downcutting caused by a decline in Pyramid Lake surface elevation. In 1975, Marble Bluff Dam (MBD) was constructed 5 kilometers upstream of the extant mouth of the Truckee River to stabilize the...
Ranking contributing areas of salt and selenium in the Lower Gunnison River Basin, Colorado, using multiple linear regression models
Joshua I. Linard
2013, Scientific Investigations Report 2013-5075
Mitigating the effects of salt and selenium on water quality in the Grand Valley and lower Gunnison River Basin in western Colorado is a major concern for land managers. Previous modeling indicated means to improve the models by including more detailed geospatial data and a more rigorous method for developing...
Updating the planetary time scale: focus on Mars
Kenneth L. Tanaka, Cathy Quantin-Nataf
2013, Ciencias Da Terra
Formal stratigraphic systems have been developed for the surface materials of the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and the Galilean satellite Ganymede. These systems are based on geologic mapping, which establishes relative ages of surfaces delineated by superposition, morphology, impact crater densities, and other relations and features. Referent units selected from the...
SSR_pipeline: a bioinformatic infrastructure for identifying microsatellites from paired-end Illumina high-throughput DNA sequencing data
Mark P. Miller, Brian J. Knaus, Thomas D. Mullins, Susan M. Haig
2013, Journal of Heredity (104) 881-885
SSR_pipeline is a flexible set of programs designed to efficiently identify simple sequence repeats (e.g., microsatellites) from paired-end high-throughput Illumina DNA sequencing data. The program suite contains 3 analysis modules along with a fourth control module that can automate analyses of large volumes of data. The modules are used to...
A fluid-driven earthquake swarm on the margin of the Yellowstone caldera
David R. Shelly, David P. Hill, Frederick Massin, Jamie Farrell, Robert B. Smith, Taka'aki Taira
2013, Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth (118) 4872-4886
Over the past several decades, the Yellowstone caldera has experienced frequent earthquake swarms and repeated cycles of uplift and subsidence, reflecting dynamic volcanic and tectonic processes. Here, we examine the detailed spatial-temporal evolution of the 2010 Madison Plateau swarm, which occurred near the northwest boundary of the Yellowstone caldera. To...
Baseline monitoring of the western Arctic Ocean estimates 20% of the Canadian Basin surface waters are undersaturated with respect to aragonite
Lisa L. Robbins, Jonathan G. Wynn, John T. Lisle, Kimberly K. Yates, Paul O. Knorr, Robert H. Byrne, Xuewu Liu, Mark C. Patsavas, Kumiko Azetsu-Scott, Taro Takahashi
2013, PLoS ONE (8)
Marine surface waters are being acidified due to uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, resulting in surface ocean areas of undersaturation with respect to carbonate minerals, including aragonite. In the Arctic Ocean, acidification is expected to occur at an accelerated rate with respect to the global oceans, but a paucity of...
Regional signatures of plant response to drought and elevated temperature across a desert ecosystem
Seth M. Munson, Esteban H. Muldavin, Jayne Belnap, Debra P.C. Peters, John P. Anderson, M. Hildegard Reiser, Kirsten Gallo, Alicia Melgoza-Castillo, Jeffrey E. Herrick, Tim A. Christiansen
2013, Ecology (94) 2030-2041
The performance of many desert plant species in North America may decline with the warmer and drier conditions predicted by climate change models, thereby accelerating land degradation and reducing ecosystem productivity. We paired repeat measurements of plant canopy cover with climate at multiple sites across the Chihuahuan Desert over the...
A scenario and forecast model for Gulf of Mexico hypoxic area and volume
Donald Scavia, Mary Anne Evans, Daniel R. Obenour
2013, Environmental Science & Technology (47)
For almost three decades, the relative size of the hypoxic region on the Louisiana-Texas continental shelf has drawn scientific and policy attention. During that time, both simple and complex models have been used to explore hypoxia dynamics and to provide management guidance relating the size of the hypoxic zone...
Characterizing regional soil mineral composition using spectroscopyand geostatistics
V.L. Mulder, S. de Bruin, J. Weyermann, Raymond F. Kokaly, M.E. Schaepman
2013, Remote Sensing of Environment (139) 415-429
This work aims at improving the mapping of major mineral variability at regional scale using scale-dependent spatial variability observed in remote sensing data. Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data and statistical methods were combined with laboratory-based mineral characterization of field samples to create maps of the distributions...
