On the use of wave parameterizations and a storm impact scaling model in National Weather Service Coastal Flood and decision support operations
Anthony Mignone, H. Stockdon, M. Willis, J.W. Cannon, R. Thompson
2012, Conference Paper, 92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, January 22-26, 2012
National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) are responsible for issuing coastal flood watches, warnings, advisories, and local statements to alert decision makers and the general public when rising water levels may lead to coastal impacts such as inundation, erosion, and wave battery. Both extratropical and tropical cyclones can...
Stable isotopes identify dietary changes associated with beak deformities in Black-Capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus)
Caroline R. Van Hemert, Colleen M. Handel, Diane M. O’Brien
2012, The Auk (129) 460-466
A large number of beak deformities of unknown etiology have recently been reported in Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) and other resident avian species in Alaska. We investigated the potential association between diet and beak deformities. We analyzed carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotopes in whole blood of Black-capped Chickadees captured...
The Nation's top 25 construction aggregates producers
Jason Christopher Willett
2012, Aggregates Manager (17) 33-37
In 2010, the market appeared to bottom out with production continuing its downward trend and average unit values down for the first time since 1998....
Primary mapping and stratigraphic data and field methods for the Snowmastodon Project
Carol Lucking, Kirk R. Johnson, Jeffery S. Pigati, Ian Miller
2012, Technical Report 2012-04
During the Snowmastodon Project, many different people collected data for a wide array of purposes under a variety of conditions. Early in the process and in an attempt to provide project-wide consistency, Kirk Johnson appointed Carol Lucking as the project’s data manager both in the field and the lab. She...
Data-driven modeling of surface temperature anomaly and solar activity trends
Michael J. Friedel
2012, Environmental Modelling and Software (37) 217-232
A novel two-step modeling scheme is used to reconstruct and analyze surface temperature and solar activity data at global, hemispheric, and regional scales. First, the self-organizing map (SOM) technique is used to extend annual modern climate data from the century to millennial scale. The SOM component planes are used to...
Methods for simulating solute breakthrough curves in pumping groundwater wells
J. Jeffrey Starn, Amvrossios C. Bagtzoglou, Gary A. Robbins
2012, Computers & Geosciences (48) 244-255
In modeling there is always a trade-off between execution time and accuracy. For gradient-based parameter estimation methods, where a simulation model is run repeatedly to populate a Jacobian (sensitivity) matrix, there exists a need for rapid simulation methods of known accuracy that can decrease execution time, and thus make the...
A historical estimate of apparent survival of American oystercatcher (Haematopus palliatus) in Virginia
Erica Nol, Sean P. Murphy, Michael D. Cadman
2012, Waterbirds (35) 631-635
Using mark-recapture models, apparent survival was estimated from older banding and re-sighting data (1978–1983) of American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus) nesting on beaches and in salt marshes of coastal Virginia, USA. Oystercatchers nesting in salt marshes exhibited higher apparent survival (0.94 ±0.03) than birds nesting on beaches (0.81 ±0.06), a difference...
Predicting the geographic distribution of a species from presence-only data subject to detection errors
Robert M. Dorazio
2012, Biometrics (68) 1303-1312
Several models have been developed to predict the geographic distribution of a species by combining measurements of covariates of occurrence at locations where the species is known to be present with measurements of the same covariates at other locations where species occurrence status (presence or absence) is unknown. In the...
The effects of feral cats on insular wildlife: the Club-Med syndrome
Steve C. Hess, Raymond M. Danner
R. M. Timm, editor(s)
2012, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference
Domestic cats have been introduced to many of the world‘s islands where they have been particularly devastating to insular wildlife which, in most cases, evolved in the absence of terrestrial predatory mammals and feline diseases. We review the effects of predation, feline diseases, and the life history characteristics of feral...
Geology and sequence stratigraphy of undiscovered oil and gas resources in conventional and continuous petroleum systems in the Upper Cretaceous Eagle Ford Group and related strata, U.S. Gulf Coast Region
Russell F. Dubiel, Ofori N. Pearson, Janet K. Pitman, Krystal M. Pearson, Scott A. Kinney
2012, Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions (62) 57-72
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently assessed the technically recoverable undiscovered oil and gas onshore and in State waters of the Gulf Coast region of the United States. The USGS defined three assessment units (AUs) with potential undiscovered conventional and continuous oil and gas resources in Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian to...
Late Quaternary sedimentological and climate changes at Lake Bosumtwi Ghana: new constraints from laminae analysis and radiocarbon age modeling
Timothy M. Shanahan, J. Warren Beck, Jonathan T. Overpeck, Nicholas P. McKay, Jeffrey S. Pigati, John A. Peck, Christopher A. Scholz, Clifford W. Heil Jr., John W. King
2012, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology (361-362) 49-60
The Lake Bosumtwi sediment record represents one of the longest and highest-resolution terrestrial records of paleoclimate change available from sub-Saharan Africa. Here we report a new sediment age model framework for the last ~ 45 cal kyr of sedimentation using a combination of high-resolution radiocarbon dating, Bayesian age-depth modeling and...
Holocene dune formation at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Area, Nevada, USA
Nicholas Lancaster, Shannon Mahan
2012, Quaternary Research (78) 266-274
Small isolated dune fields in the northern Mojave Desert are important centers of biodiversity and archaeological occupation sites. Currently dunes at Ash Meadows, Nevada, are stabilized by vegetation and are experiencing erosion of their upwind margins, indicating a negative sediment budget. New OSL ages from dunes at Ash Meadows indicate...
Emerging contaminants at a closed and an operating landfill in Oklahoma
William J. Andrews, Jason R. Masoner, Isabelle M. Cozzarelli
2012, Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation (32) 120-130
Landfills are the final depositories for a wide range of solid waste from both residential and commercial sources, and therefore have the potential to produce leachate containing many organic compounds found in consumer products such as pharmaceuticals, plasticizers, disinfectants, cleaning agents, fire retardants, flavorings, and preservatives, known as emerging contaminants...
Modeling responses of large-river fish populations to global climate change through downscaling and incorporation of predictive uncertainty
Mark L. Wildhaber, Christopher K. Wikle, Christopher J. Anderson, Kristie J. Franz, Edward H. Moran, Rima Dey
Helmut Mader, Julia Kraml, editor(s)
2012, Conference Paper, 9th International Symposium on Ecohydraulics 2012 Proceedings
Climate change operates over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Understanding its effects on ecosystems requires multi-scale models. For understanding effects on fish populations of riverine ecosystems, climate predicted by coarse-resolution Global Climate Models must be downscaled to Regional Climate Models to watersheds to river hydrology...
Characterization of previously unidentified lunar pyroclastic deposits using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) data
J. Olaf Gustafson, James F. Bell, Lisa R. Gaddis, B. Ray Hawke, Thomas A. Giguere
2012, Journal of Geophysical Research E: Planets (117)
We used a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) global monochrome Wide-angle Camera (WAC) mosaic to conduct a survey of the Moon to search for previously unidentified pyroclastic deposits. Promising locations were examined in detail using LROC multispectral WAC mosaics, high-resolution LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) images, and Clementine multispectral (ultraviolet-visible...
Assessing consumption of bioactive micro-particles by filter-feeding Asian carp
Nathan R. Jensen, Jon J. Amberg, James A. Luoma, Liza R. Walleser, Mark P. Gaikowski
2012, Journal of Aquaculture Research & Development (3)
Silver carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix (SVC) and bighead carp H. nobilis (BHC) have impacted waters in the US since their escape. Current chemical controls for aquatic nuisance species are non-selective. Development of a bioactive micro-particle that exploits filter-feeding habits of SVC or BHC could result in a new control tool. It...
Design and development of linked data from the National Map
E. Lynn Usery, Dalia E. Varanka
2012, Semantic Web (3) 371-384
The development of linked data on the World-Wide Web provides the opportunity for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to supply its extensive volumes of geospatial data, information, and knowledge in a machine interpretable form and reach users and applications that heretofore have been unavailable. To pilot a process to take...
Dryland biological soil crust cyanobacteria show unexpected decreases in abundance under long-term elevated CO2
Blaire Steven, La Verne Gallegos-Graves, Chris M. Yeager, Jayne Belnap, R. David Evans, Cheryl R. Kuske
2012, Environmental Microbiology (14) 3247-3258
Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) cover soil surfaces in many drylands globally. The impacts of 10 years of elevated atmospheric CO2 on the cyanobacteria in biocrusts of an arid shrubland were examined at a large manipulated experiment in Nevada, USA. Cyanobacteria-specific quantitative PCR surveys of cyanobacteria small-subunit (SSU) rRNA genes suggested...
Mineral resource of the month: mercury
Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey
2012, Earth (57) 61-61
The article offers information on mercury, a mineral commodity used in industrial and small-scale gold mining applications. Mercury has been reported to be used for amalgamation with gold since the Roman times. Mercury from cinnabar from Almadén, Spain has been used by Romans and has been continued to be used...
Developing Vs30 site-condition maps by combining observations with geologic and topographic constraints
E.M. Thompson, D.J. Wald
2012, Conference Paper, The 15th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering: September 24-28, 2012, Lisbon, Portugal
Despite obvious limitations as a proxy for site amplification, the use of time-averaged shear-wave velocity over the top 30 m (VS30) remains widely practiced, most notably through its use as an explanatory variable in ground motion prediction equations (and thus hazard maps and ShakeMaps, among other applications). As such, we...
Impact disruption and recovery of the deep subsurface biosphere
Charles S. Cockell, Mary A. Voytek, Aaron L. Gronstal, Kai Finster, Julie D. Kirshtein, Kieren Howard, Joachim Reitner, Gregory S. Gohn, Ward E. Sanford, J. Wright Horton Jr., Jens Kallmeyer, Laura Kelly, David S. Powars
2012, Astrobiology (12) 231-246
Although a large fraction of the world's biomass resides in the subsurface, there has been no study of the effects of catastrophic disturbance on the deep biosphere and the rate of its subsequent recovery. We carried out an investigation of the microbiology of a 1.76 km drill core obtained from the...
Perlite
W. Bolen
2012, Mining Engineering (64) 80-81
Domestic production, consumption, exports and prices of perlite in the United States were all estimated to have decreased in 2011 compared with 2010, but not significantly. The weak economic conditions that prevailed in the United States for most of the 2011 probably accounted for these decreases. The only statistic that...
Type E botulism outbreaks: a manual for beach managers and the public
2012, Book
The Great Lakes basin has undergone a resurgence of Type E botulism (often referred to as avian botulism) in recent years, characterized by dead birds and fish along the shores of the Great Lakes. The number of deaths and areas affected appear to be increasing to levels that induce concern...
Habitat use and movement patterns of Northern Pintails during spring in northern Japan: the importance of agricultural lands
Noriyuki M. Yamaguchi, Jerry W. Hupp, Paul L. Flint, John M. Pearce, Yusuke Shigeta, Tetsuo Shimada, Emiko N. Hiraoka, Hiroyoshi Higuchi
2012, Journal of Field Ornithology (83) 141-153
From 2006 to 2009, we marked 198 Northern Pintails (Anas acuta) with satellite transmitters on their wintering areas in Japan to study their migration routes and habitat use in spring staging areas. We hypothesized that the distribution of pintails during spring staging was influenced by patterns of land use and...
The ICDP Snake River Geothermal Drilling Project: preliminary overview of borehole geophysics
Douglas R. Schmitt, Lee M. Liberty, James E. Kessler, Jochem Kuck, Randolph Kofman, Ross Bishop, John W. Shervais, James P. Evans, Duane E. Champion
2012, Geothermal Resources Council Transactions (36) 1017-1022
Hotspot: The Snake River Geothermal Drilling Project was undertaken to better understand the geothermal systems in three locations across the Snake River Plain with varying geological and hydrological structure. An extensive series of standard and specialized geophysical logs were obtained in each of the wells. Hydrogen-index neutron and γ-γ density...
