Atmospheric deposition, water-quality, and sediment data for selected lakes in Mount Rainer, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks, Washington, 2008-10
Rich W. Sheibley, James R. Foreman, Patrick W. Moran, Peter W. Swarzenski
2012, Data Series 721
To evaluate the potential effect from atmospheric deposition of nitrogen to high-elevation lakes, the U.S. Geological Survey partnered with the National Park Service to develop a "critical load" of nitrogen for sediment diatoms. A critical load is defined as the level of a given pollutant (in this case, nitrogen) at...
Changes in water budgets and sediment yields from a hypothetical agricultural field as a function of landscape and management characteristics--A unit field modeling approach
Jason L. Roth, Paul D. Capel
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5203
Crop agriculture occupies 13 percent of the conterminous United States. Agricultural management practices, such as crop and tillage types, affect the hydrologic flow paths through the landscape. Some agricultural practices, such as drainage and irrigation, create entirely new hydrologic flow paths upon the landscapes where they are implemented. These hydrologic...
American alligator digestion rate of blue crabs and its implications for stomach contents analysis
James C. Nifong, Adam E. Rosenblatt, Nathan A. Johnson, William Barichivich, Brian Silliman, Michael R. Heithaus
2012, Copeia (2012) 419-423
Stomach contents analysis (SCA) provides a snap-shot observation of a consumer's diet. Interpretation of SCA data can be complicated by many factors, including variation in gastric residence times and digestion rates among prey taxa. Although some SCA methods are reported to efficiently remove all stomach contents, the effectiveness of these...
Towards a theory of ecotone resilience: coastal vegetation on a salinity gradient
Jiang Jiang, Daozhou Gao, Donald L. DeAngelis
2012, Theoretical Population Biology (82) 29-37
Ecotones represent locations where vegetation change is likely to occur as a result of climate and other environmental changes. Using a model of an ecotone vulnerable to such future changes, we estimated the resilience of the ecotone to disturbances. The specific ecotone is that between two different vegetation types, salinity-tolerant...
Dark and background response stability for the Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor
Kelly Vanderwerff, Matthew Montanaro
2012, Conference Paper, Proceedings of SPIE volume 8510
The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) is a pushbroom sensor that will be a part of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), which is a joint mission between NASA and the USGS. The TIRS instrument will continue to collect the thermal infrared data that are currently being collected by the Thematic...
High-resolution digital elevation dataset for Crater Lake National Park and vicinity, Oregon, based on LiDAR survey of August-September 2010 and bathymetric survey of July 2000
Joel E. Robinson
2012, Data Series 716
Crater Lake partially fills the caldera that formed approximately 7,700 years ago during the eruption of a 12,000-foot volcano known as Mount Mazama. The caldera-forming or climactic eruption of Mount Mazama devastated the surrounding landscape, left a thick deposit of pumice and ash in adjacent valleys, and spread a blanket...
Annual fluxes of sediment-associated trace/major elements, carbon, nutrients, and sulfur from US coastal rivers
Arthur J. Horowitz, Verlon C. Stephens, Kent A. Elrick, James J. Smith
2012, Conference Paper, Erosion and sediment yields in the changing environment : proceedings of an IAHS International Commission on Continental Erosion symposium held at the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, CAS-Chengdu, China, 11-15 October 2012
About 260–270 Mt of suspended sediment are discharged annually from the conterminous USA; approximately 69% derives from Gulf rivers (n = 36), 24% from Pacific rivers (n = 42), and 7% from Atlantic rivers (n = 54). Elevated sediment-associated chemical concentrations relative to baseline levels occur in the reverse order...
2011 Year in review - Earth Resources Observation and Science Center
2012, Open-File Report 2012-1185
The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center's 2011 Year in Review is an annual report recounting the broad scope of the Center's 2011 accomplishments. The report covers preparations for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) launch, the ever-increasing use of free Landsat data, monitoring the effects of natural...
waterData--An R package for retrieval, analysis, and anomaly calculation of daily hydrologic time series data, version 1.0
Karen R. Ryberg, Aldo V. Vecchia
2012, Open-File Report 2012-1168
Hydrologic time series data and associated anomalies (multiple components of the original time series representing variability at longer-term and shorter-term time scales) are useful for modeling trends in hydrologic variables, such as streamflow, and for modeling water-quality constituents. An R package, called waterData, has been developed for importing daily hydrologic...
Viral fitness: definitions, measurement, and current insights
Andrew R. Wargo, Gael Kurath
2012, Current Opinion in Virology (2) 538-545
Viral fitness is an active area of research, with recent work involving an expanded number of human, non-human vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, and bacterial viruses. Many publications deal with RNA viruses associated with major disease emergence events, such as HIV-1, influenza virus, and Dengue virus. Study topics include drug resistance, immune...
A transect through the base of the Bronson Hill Terrane in western New Hampshire
Gregory J. Walsh, Peter M. Valley, Karri R. Sicard
Thelma Barton Thompson, Peter J. Thompson, editor(s)
2012, Conference Paper
This trip will present the preliminary results of ongoing bedrock mapping in the North Hartland and Claremont North 7.5-minute quadrangles in western New Hampshire. The trip will travel from the Lebanon pluton to just north of the Sugar River pluton (Fig. 1) with the aim of examining the lower structural...
Comparison of 2008-2009 water years and historical water-quality data, upper Gunnison River Basin, Colorado
Patricia A. Solberg, Bryan Moore, Ty D. Blacklock
2012, Data Series 687
Population growth and changes in land use have the potential to affect water quality and quantity in the upper Gunnison River Basin. In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management, City of Gunnison, Colorado River Water Conservation District, Crested Butte South Metropolitan District,...
Carbon export by rivers draining the conterminous United States
Edward G. Stets, Robert G. Striegl
2012, Inland Waters (2) 177-184
Material exports by rivers, particularly carbon exports, provide insight to basin geology, weathering, and ecological processes within the basin. Accurate accounting of those exports is valuable to understanding present, past, and projected basin-wide changes in those processes. We calculated lateral export of inorganic and organic carbon (IC and OC) from...
Characterization of storm runoff from selected South Carolina Department of Transportation maintenance yards
Kevin J. Conlon, Peter J. Reinhart
2012, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 2012 South Carolina Water Resources Conference
The objective of this project is to collect sufficient stormwater water-quality and flow data to document the type, concentration, and event load of selected constituents transported from South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) maintenance yards by stormwater runoff....
Toxicity of carbon nanotubes to freshwater aquatic invertebrates
Joseph N. Mwangi, Ning Wang, Christopher G. Ingersoll, Doug K. Hardesty, Eric L. Brunson, Hao Li, Baolin Deng
2012, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (31) 1823-1830
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are hydrophobic in nature and thus tend to accumulate in sediments if released into aquatic environments. As part of our overall effort to examine the toxicity of carbon-based nanomaterials to sediment-dwelling invertebrates, we have evaluated the toxicity of different types of CNTs in 14-d water-only exposures to...
Woody riparian vegetation near selected streamgages in the western United States
Gregor T. Auble, Jonathan M. Friedman, Patrick B. Shafroth, Michael F. Merigliano, Michael L. Scott
2012, Data Series 708
Areal cover and occupancy of woody riparian species near 456 streamgages in the western United States were obtained from site visits during the growing seasons of 1996-2002. We made concomitant estimates of grazing intensity, channel stabilization and incision, gradient, sediment particle size, and nearby planting of Russian olive. The purpose...
Quantification of water-level variability effect on plant species populations using paleoecological and hydrological time series data
Edwin A. Roehl Jr., Paul Conrads, Christopher Bernhardt
2012, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 2012 South Carolina Water Resources Conference
Soil cores provide valuable data on historical changes in vegetation and hydrologic conditions. Empirical models were developed to quantify the effect of meteorological and hydrologic forcing on plant species distributions over a 110-year period in Water Conservation Area 1 (WCA1) in the Florida Everglades, also known as the Arthur R....
Fine-scale habitat use of reintroduced black-footed ferrets on prairie dog colonies in New Mexico
Jennifer G. Chipault, Dean E. Biggins, James K. Detling, Dustin H. Long, Robin M. Reich
2012, Western North American Naturalist (72) 216-227
Black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) are among the most endangered animals in North America. Reintroductions of captive-born ferrets onto prairie dog (Cynomys spp.) colonies are crucial to the conservation of the species. In September 2007, captive-born ferrets were released on a black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) colony at the Vermejo Park...
Resource selection models are useful in predicting fine-scale distributions of black-footed ferrets in prairie dog colonies
David A. Eads, David S. Jachowski, Dean E. Biggins, Travis M. Livieri, Marc R. Matchett, Joshua J. Millspaugh
2012, Western North American Naturalist (72) 206-215
Wildlife-habitat relationships are often conceptualized as resource selection functions (RSFs)—models increasingly used to estimate species distributions and prioritize habitat conservation. We evaluated the predictive capabilities of 2 black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) RSFs developed on a 452-ha colony of black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) in the Conata Basin, South Dakota. We...
Geologic map of the north polar region of Mars
Kenneth L. Tanaka, Corey M. Fortezzo
2012, Scientific Investigations Map 3177
The north polar region of Mars occurs within the central and lowest part of the vast northern plains of Mars and is dominated by the roughly circular north polar plateau, Planum Boreum. The northern plains formed very early in Martian time and have collected volcanic flows and sedimentary materials shed...
Simulation of daily streamflows at gaged and ungaged locations within the Cedar River Basin, Iowa, using a Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System model
Daniel E. Christiansen
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5213
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, conducted a study to examine techniques for estimation of daily streamflows using hydrological models and statistical methods. This report focuses on the use of a hydrologic model, the U.S. Geological Survey's Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System, to estimate daily...
Importance of lunar and temporal conditions for spotlight surveys of adult black-footed ferrets
David A. Eads, David S. Jachowski, Joshua J. Millspaugh, Dean E. Biggins
2012, Western North American Naturalist (72) 179-190
Black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) spend most daylight hours underground in prairie dog (Cynomys) burrows and exhibit aboveground movements primarily at night. Moonlight can influence the activity patterns of ferrets and, consequently, might influence the efficiency of spotlight surveys used by biologists to monitor ferret populations. We related detection of adult...
Information on black-footed ferret biology collected within the framework of ferret conservation
Dean E. Biggins
2012, Western North American Naturalist (72) 129-133
Once feared to be extinct, black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) were rediscovered near Meeteetse, Wyoming, in 1981, resulting in renewed conservation and research efforts for this highly endangered species. A need for information directly useful to recovery has motivated much monitoring of ferrets since that time, but field activities have enabled...
Saturated thickness and water in storage in the High Plains aquifer, 2009, and water-level changes and changes in water in storage in the High Plains aquifer, 1980 to 1995, 1995 to 2000, 2000 to 2005, and 2005 to 2009
Virginia L. McGuire, Kris D. Lund, Brenda K. Densmore
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5177
The High Plains aquifer underlies about 112 million acres (about 175,000 square miles) in parts of eight States—Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Water levels declined in parts of the High Plains aquifer soon after the onset of substantial irrigation with groundwater (about 1950). This...
Seafloor geology and benthic habitats, San Pedro Shelf, southern California
Florence L. Wong, Peter Dartnell, Brian D. Edwards, Eleyne L. Phillips
2012, Data Series 552
Seafloor samples, videography, still photography, and real-time descriptions of geologic and biologic constituents at or near the seafloor of the San Pedro Shelf, southern California, advance the study of natural and man-made processes on this coastal area off the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Multibeam echo-sounder data collected by the U.S....
