Inferring the relative resilience of alternative states
David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen, Carmen Rojo, Miguel Alvarez-Cobelas, Maria A. Rodrigo, Salvador Sanchez-Carrillo
2013, PLoS ONE (8)
Ecological systems may occur in alternative states that differ in ecological structures, functions and processes. Resilience is the measure of disturbance an ecological system can absorb before changing states. However, how the intrinsic structures and processes of systems that characterize their states affects their resilience remains unclear. We analyzed time...
A model of strength
Douglas H. Johnson, R.D. Cook
2013, Science (342) 192-193
In her AAAS News & Notes piece "Can the Southwest manage its thirst?" (26 July, p. 362), K. Wren quotes Ajay Kalra, who advocates a particular method for predicting Colorado River streamflow "because it eschews complex physical climate models for a statistical data-driven modeling approach." A preference for data-driven models...
Previously unrecognized regional structure of the Coastal Belt of the Franciscan Complex, northern California, revealed by magnetic data
Victoria E. Langenheim, Robert C. Jachens, Carl M. Wentworth, Robert J. McLaughlin
2013, Geosphere (9) 1-17
Magnetic anomalies provide surprising structural detail within the previously undivided Coastal Belt, the westernmost, youngest, and least-metamorphosed part of the Franciscan Complex of northern California. Although the Coastal Belt consists almost entirely of arkosic graywacke and shale of mainly Eocene age, new detailed aeromagnetic data show that it is pervasively...
Lake shoreline in the contiguous United States: Quantity, distribution and sensitivity to observation resolution
Luke A. Winslow, Jordan S. Read, Paul C. Hanson, Emily H. Stanley
2013, Freshwater Biology
1. Quantifying lake biogeochemical processing at broad spatial scales requires that we scale processes along with physical metrics. Past work has primarily scaled lentic processes using estimates of lake surface area. However, many processes important to lakes, such as material, energy and biological fluxes and biogeochemical cycling, scale with lake...
It's time for bold new approaches to link delta science and policymaking
James E. Cloern, Ellen Hanak
2013, San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (11)
California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is widely recognized as a highly damaged ecosystem. The Delta is also emblematic of a growing sense worldwide that society needs to do a better job of using scientific knowledge to guide conservation and resource management policies. Fortunately, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to get it right in building...
Analysis of Neogene deformation between Beaver, Utah and Barstow, California: Suggestions for altering the extensional paradigm
R. Ernest Anderson, Sue Beard, Edward A. Mankinen, John W. Hillhouse
2013, Geological Society of America Special Papers (499) 1-67
For more than two decades, the paradigm of large-magnitude (~250 km), northwest-directed (~N70°W) Neogene extensional lengthening between the Colorado Plateau and Sierra Nevada at the approximate latitude of Las Vegas has remained largely unchallenged, as has the notion that the strain integrates with coeval strains in adjacent regions and with...
Prescribed-fire effects on an aquatic community of a southwest montane grassland system
Colleen A. Caldwell, Gerald Z. Jacobi, Michael C. Anderson, Robert R. Parmenter, Jeanine McGann, William R. Gould, Robert DuBey, M. Donna Jacobi
2013, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (33) 1049-1062
The use of prescription fire has long been recognized as a reliable management tool to suppress vegetative succession processes and to reduce fuel loading to prevent catastrophic wildfires, but very little attention has been paid to the effects on aquatic systems. A late-fall prescribed burn was implemented to characterize effects...
Effect of correlated observation error on parameters, predictions, and uncertainty
Claire R. Tiedeman, Christopher T. Green
2013, Water Resources Research (49) 6339-6355
Correlations among observation errors are typically omitted when calculating observation weights for model calibration by inverse methods. We explore the effects of omitting these correlations on estimates of parameters, predictions, and uncertainties. First, we develop a new analytical expression for the difference in parameter variance estimated with and without error...
Cutthroat trout virus as a surrogate in vitro infection model for testing inhibitors of hepatitis E virus replication
Yannick Debing, James Winton, Johan Neyts, Kai Dallmeier
2013, Antiviral Research (100) 98-101
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is one of the most important causes of acute hepatitis worldwide. Although most infections are self-limiting, mortality is particularly high in pregnant women. Chronic infections can occur in transplant and other immune-compromised patients. Successful treatment of chronic hepatitis E has been reported with ribavirin and pegylated...
Runoff-generated debris flows: observations and modeling of surge initiation, magnitude, and frequency
Jason W. Kean, Scott W. McCoy, Gregory E. Tucker, Dennis M. Staley, Jeffrey A. Coe
2013, Journal of Geophysical Research F: Earth Surface (118) 2190-2207
Runoff during intense rainstorms plays a major role in generating debris flows in many alpine areas and burned steeplands. Yet compared to debris flow initiation from shallow landslides, the mechanics by which runoff generates a debris flow are less understood. To better understand debris flow initiation by surface water runoff,...
Links between riparian landcover, instream environment and fish assemblages in headwater streams of south-eastern Brazil
Bruna B. Cruz, Leandro E. Miranda, Mauricio Cetra
2013, Ecology of Freshwater Fish (22) 607-616
We hypothesised and tested a hierarchical organisation model where riparian landcover would influence bank composition and light availability, which in turn would influence instream environments and control fish assemblages. The study was conducted during the dry season in 11 headwater tributaries of the Sorocaba River in the upper Paraná River...
Spatial and temporal variation in efficiency of the Moore egg collector
Thomas A. Worthington, Shannon K. Brewer, Nicole Farless
2013, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (33) 1113-1118
The Moore egg collector (MEC) was developed for quantitative and nondestructive capture of semibuoyant fish eggs. Previous studies have indicated that capture efficiency of the MEC was low and the use of one device did not adequately represent the spatial distribution within the water column of egg surrogates (gellan beads)...
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...
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....
Response of diatoms and silicoflagellates to climate change in the Santa Barbara Basin during the past 250 years and the rise of the toxic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia australis
John A. Barron, David Bukry, David B. Field, Bruce Finney
2013, Quaternary International (310) 140-154
Diatoms and silicoflagellate assemblages were examined in two year-increments of varved samples spanning the interval from 1748 through 2007 in Santa Barbara Basin (SBB) box core SBBC0806 to determine the timing and impact of possible 20th century warming on several different components of the plankton. Diatoms (Thalassionema nitzschioides =TN) and...
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...
On the absolute calibration of SO2 cameras
Peter Lubcke, Nicole Bobrowski, Sebastian Illing, Christoph Kern, Jose Manuel Alvarez Nieves, Leif Vogel, Johannes Zielcke, Hugo Delgados Granados, Ulrich Platt
2013, Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (6) 677-696
Sulphur dioxide emission rate measurements are an important tool for volcanic monitoring and eruption risk assessment. The SO2 camera technique remotely measures volcanic emissions by analysing the ultraviolet absorption of SO2 in a narrow spectral window between 300 and 320 nm using solar radiation scattered in the atmosphere. The SO2...
Recovery of a top predator mediates negative eutrophic effects on seagrass
Brent B. Hughes, Ron Eby, Eric Van Dyke, M. Tim Tinker, Corina I. Marks, Kenneth S. Johnson, Kerstin Wasson
2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (110) 15313-15318
A fundamental goal of the study of ecology is to determine the drivers of habitat-forming vegetation, with much emphasis given to the relative importance to vegetation of “bottom-up” forces such as the role of nutrients and “top-down” forces such as the influence of herbivores and their predators. For coastal vegetation...
Two new species of Isospora (Apicomplexa: Eimeriidae) from skinks Emoia spp. (Sauria: Scincidae), from Fiji and Papua New Guinea
Chris T. McAllister, Donald W. Duszynski, Robert N. Fisher
2013, Journal of Parasitology (99) 677-679
Between September and October 1991 and again during September 1992, skinks (Emoia spp.) were collected from various localities on Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) and examined for coccidians. One of 4 (25%) De Vis' emo skinks (Emoia pallidiceps) from PNG harbored an undescribed species of Isospora in its feces....
The influence of stream thermal regimes and preferential flow paths on hyporheic exchange in a glacial meltwater stream
Karen D. Cozzetto, Kenneth E. Bencala, Michael N. Gooseff, Diane M. McKnight
2013, Water Resources Research (49) 5552-5569
Given projected increases in stream temperatures attributable to global change, improved understanding of relationships between stream temperatures and hyporheic exchange would be useful. We conducted two conservative tracer injection experiments in a glacial meltwater stream, to evaluate the effects of hyporheic thermal gradients on exchange processes, including preferential flow paths...
A network extension of species occupancy models in a patchy environment applied to the Yosemite toad (Anaxyrus canorus)
Eric L. Berlow, Roland A. Knapp, Steven M. Ostoja, Richard J. Williams, Heather McKenny, John R. Matchett, Qinghau Guo, Gary M. Fellers, Patrick Kleeman, Matthew L. Brooks, Lucas Joppa
2013, PLoS ONE (8)
A central challenge of conservation biology is using limited data to predict rare species occurrence and identify conservation areas that play a disproportionate role in regional persistence. Where species occupy discrete patches in a landscape, such predictions require data about environmental quality of individual patches and the connectivity among high...
Soil Seed Bank Responses to Postfire Herbicide and Native Seeding Treatments Designed to Control Bromus tectorum in a Pinyon–Juniper Woodland at Zion National Park, USA
Matthew L. Brooks, graduate student Hondo Brisbin, Professor Andrea Thode, graduate student Karen Weber
2013, Invasive Plant Science and Management (6) 118-129
The continued threat of an invasive, annual brome (Bromus) species in the western United States has created the need for integrated approaches to postfire restoration. Additionally, the high germination rate, high seed production, and seed bank carryover of annual bromes points to the need to assay soil seed banks as...
A new model for the growth of basaltic shields based on deformation of Fernandina volcano, Galápagos Islands
Marco Bagnardi, Falk Amelung, Michael P. Poland
2013, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (377-378) 358-366
Space-geodetic measurements of surface deformation produced by the most recent eruptions at Fernandina – the most frequently erupting volcano in the Galápagos Archipelago – reveal that all have initiated with the intrusion of subhorizontal sills from a shallow magma reservoir. This includes eruptions from fissures that are oriented both radially...
Evaluation of internal loading and water level changes: implications for phosphorus, algal production, and nuisance blooms in Kabetogama Lake, Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota
Victoria G. Christensen, Ryan P. Maki, Richard L. Kiesling
2013, Lake and Reservoir Management (29) 202-215
Hydrologic manipulations have the potential to exacerbate or remediate eutrophication in productive reservoirs. Dam operations at Kabetogama Lake, Minnesota, were modified in 2000 to restore a more natural water regime and improve water quality. The US Geological Survey and National Park Service evaluated nutrient, algae, and nuisance bloom data in...
Threatened and endangered subspecies with vulnerable ecological traits Also have high susceptibility to sea level rise and habitat fragmentation
Allison M. Benscoter, Joshua S. Reece, Reed F. Noss, Laura B. Brandt, Frank J. Mazzotti, Stephanie S. Romañach, James I. Watling
2013, PLoS ONE (8)
The presence of multiple interacting threats to biodiversity and the increasing rate of species extinction make it critical to prioritize management efforts on species and communities that maximize conservation success. We implemented a multi-step approach that coupled vulnerability assessments evaluating threats to Florida taxa such as climate change, sea-level rise,...
