Modeling individual-level and population-level nest success of California Condors from movement data
Andrea Blackburn, Joseph Michael Eisaguirre, Joseph C. Brandt, Arianna Punzalan, Laura Mcmahon, Molly Astell, Nadya E. Seal Faith, David J. Meyer, Estelle A. Sandhaus
2025, Journal of Raptor Research (59)
The California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is a critically endangered species with populations that are not currently self-sustaining. Although understanding nest success is key to understanding trends in their populations, field monitoring of condor nests has become increasingly challenging as the number of nesting condors has increased and their range has...
Optimizing the effectiveness of connectivity modifiers to reduce dryland degradation
Kristina E. Young, Brandon L. Edwards, Michael C. Duniway, Nicholas P. Webb
2025, Restoration Ecology (33)
Dryland degradation from unsustainable land use and increasing aridity often manifests as bare, interconnected areas that facilitate the loss or redistribution of resources (soil, seeds, and nutrients) through wind and run-off. Physical structures like branches and stick bundles, which disrupt these pathways and retain resources, are crucial for rehabilitation and...
Quality assessment of past spawning mark estimations from a long-term survey in the Connecticut River watershed
Jacqueline B. Stephens, Adrian Jordaan, David Perkins, Kenneth Sprankle, Allison H. Roy
2025, Cooperator Science Series CSS-168-2025
The calcified structures of fishes provide insight into their periodic growth rates and can be combined with other biological variables to identify metrics such as size or age at maturity and mortality rates. Collecting this information on growth and life history can help evaluate the success of conservation efforts and...
Foraging of wading birds on a patchy landscape: Simulating effects of social information, interference competition, and patch selection on prey intake and individual distribution
Hyo Won Lee, Donald L. DeAngelis, Simeon Yurek, Yannis P. Papastamatiou
2025, Ecological Modelling (507)
Foragers on patchy landscapes must acquire sufficient resources despite uncertainty in the location and amount of the resources. Optimal Foraging Theory posits that foragers deal with this uncertainty by using strategies that optimize resource intake within foraging periods. For species such as wading birds, this optimization is closely linked to...
Bayesian ETAS modeling for the Pacific Northwest: Uncovering effects of tectonic regimes, regional differences, and swarms on aftershock parameters
Max Schneider, Michael Barall, Peter Guttorp, Jeanne L. Hardebeck, Andrew J. Michael, Morgan T. Page, Nicholas van der Elst
2025, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (115) 2219-2236
The Pacific Northwest (PNW) of North America has high seismic hazard due to numerous earthquake sources under populated areas. It hosts several tectonic regimes and subregional seismic zones that are hypothesized to have different patterns of earthquake and aftershock occurrence. It is also predisposed to earthquake swarms, which can complicate...
Linking fire radiative power to land cover, fire history, and environmental setting in Alaska, 2003–2022
Jessica J. Walker, Rachel A. Loehman, Britt Windsor Smith, Christopher E. Soulard
2025, International Journal of Wildland Fire (34)
BackgroundFire radiative power (FRP) shows promise as a diagnostic and predictive indicator of fire behavior and post-fire effects in Alaska, USA.AimsTo investigate relationships between FRP, vegetation functional groups, and environmental settings in Alaska (2003–2022) under various fire history conditions.MethodsWe tested for distinctness of MODIS...
Flood-inundation maps for 14.8 miles of Little and Big Papillion Creeks in Omaha, Nebraska, 2023
Kellan R. Strauch, Bradley R. Hoefer
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2025-5032
Digital flood-inundation map libraries for two reaches that constitute 14.8 miles of Little and Big Papillion Creeks in Omaha, Nebraska, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource District. The flood-inundation maps, which can be accessed through the USGS Flood Inundation Mapping...
Kiloyear cycles of carbonate and Mg-silicate replacement at Von Damm hydrothermal vent field
Amy Gartman, Terrence Blackburn, Kiana Frank, Susan Q. Lang, Jeffrey S. Seewald
2025, Geology (53) 668-672
The Von Damm vent field (VDVF) on the Mid-Cayman Rise in the Caribbean Sea is unique among modern hydrothermal systems in that the chimneys and mounds are almost entirely composed of talc. We analyzed samples collected in 2020 and report that in addition to disordered talc of variable crystallinity, carbonates...
Peak streamflow trends in Montana and northern Wyoming and their relation to changes in climate, water years 1921–2020
Steven K. Sando, Nancy A. Barth, Roy Sando, Katherine J. Chase
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5064-G
Frequency analysis on annual peak streamflow (hereinafter, peak flow) is essential to water-resources management applications, including critical structure design (for example, bridges and culverts) and floodplain mapping. Nonstationarity is a statistical property of a peak-flow series such that the distributional properties (the mean, variance, or skew) change either gradually (monotonic...
Effects of riparian forest thinning on resident salmonid fishes in coastal northern California catchments
David A. Roon, Jason B. Dunham, Joseph R. Benjamin, Bret C. Harvey, James R Bellmore
2025, Freshwater Biology (70)
Resource managers are interested in whether thinning second-growth forests may be a viable restoration strategy for stream and riparian habitats, but may be concerned about the potential impacts that increases in stream temperature associated with riparian thinning treatments may have on cold-water salmonid fishes.We evaluated the effects of riparian...
Cave records reveal recent origin of North America’s deepest canyon
Matthew Morriss, Nate Mitchell, Brian Yanites, Lydia M. Staisch, Oliver Korup
2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (122)
We explore how and when Hells Canyon, North America’s deepest river gorge (~2,400 m deep), formed, addressing these fundamental questions first posed by W. Lindgren [The Gold Belt of the Blue Mountains of Oregon (1901)]. Existing hypotheses about the canyon’s formation and timing of incision remain speculative due to a lack...
Infrasonic directivity of monopole, dipole, and bipole ground-surface reflected sources
Alexandra M. Iezzi, Robin S. Matoza, Emma V. Opper, Keehoon Kim
2025, Geophysical Journal International (242)
Infrasound (acoustic waves below 20 Hz) can be used to detect, locate and quantify activity in the atmosphere such as volcanic eruptions and anthropogenic explosions. Attempts to quantify volcanic eruption parameters such as exit velocity, plume height and mass flow rate using infrasound data depend strongly on assumptions of the acoustic...
Cultivating reciprocity and supporting Indigenous lifeways through the cultural transformation of natural resource management in North America
Jonathan J. Fisk, Richard Eugene Waggaman Berl, Jonathan W. Long, Jacobs. Lara, Lily M. van Eeden, Melinda Adams, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Jazmin Murphy, Michael C. Gavin, Chris K Williams, Jonathan Salerno, Bas Verschuuren, Nathan Bennett, Rodrigue Idohou, Alexander Mawyer
2025, People and Nature (7) 1171-1184
Recent decades have seen increasing calls for implementing Indigenous Knowledges (IK) in natural resource management (NRM). However, efforts have been limited by the cultural incommensurabilities between (1) NRM institutions, which are rooted in worldviews that prioritize extraction for dominant cultures and assume dominance over nature and (2) Indigenous worldviews...
Protected from Pterygoplichthys? Predicting thermal habitat suitability for nonnative armored catfish in the Suwannee River
Andrew Kenneth Carlson
2025, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (154) 398-413
ObjectiveNonnative fishes can modify ecosystems and harm economies when they are introduced to new environments. Climate change is likely to assist the spread and establishment of some nonnative fishes (e.g., warmwater species), but spatiotemporal gaps in water temperature monitoring and modeling may prevent ecologists and managers from forecasting thermal habitat...
A joint Gaussian process model of geochemistry, geophysics, and temperature for groundwater TDS in the San Ardo Oil Field, California, USA
Michael J. Stephens, Will Chang, David H. Shimabukuro, Amanda Howery, Theron Sowers, Janice M. Gillespie
2025, Journal of Hydrology (661)
Decline in availability of fresh groundwater has expanded interest in brackish groundwater resources; however, the distribution of brackish groundwater is poorly understood. Water resources in sedimentary basins across the United States often overlie oil and gas development. Mapping of groundwater total dissolved solids (TDS) using data from oil...
Reconstructing late Pleistocene relative sea levels on transgressed shelves: An example from central California
Elisa Medri, Alexander Simms, Jared W. Kluesner, Samuel Y. Johnson, Stuart Nishenko, H. Gary Greene, James E. Conrad, Devin Rand
2025, Quaternary Science Reviews (361)
Although prevalent for the late Holocene, relative sea level (RSL) constraints during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) are sparse. This scarcity of data is particularly pronounced along mid-latitude shelves such as central California, which lack post LGM RSL constraints older than 12 ka. In this study we...
The 3D Elevation Program—Supporting New Mexico’s Economy
Carol Lydic
2025, Fact Sheet 2025-3014
Introduction Federal, State, Tribal, and local entities managing lands in New Mexico have concerns about wildfire risk, wildlife habitat, and flood risk. Land managers in urban areas along the Rio Grande corridor and in the State’s rural northwest and southeast also have concerns about existing and developing roads, buildings, and other...
Managing water for birds—A tool for the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, southeastern Oregon
Cassandra D. Smith
2025, Scientific Investigations Report 2025-5024
The “Water for Birds Tool” is a spreadsheet-based tool (using Microsoft Excel) designed to help resource managers assess the spatial extent and types of bird habitats in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, southeastern Oregon. The tool quantifies the areas of open water, partial water, and water depths on a monthly...
Mapping eelgrass (Zostera marina) cover and biomass at Izembek Lagoon, Alaska, using in-situ field data and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery
David C. Douglas, Michael D. Fleming, Vijay P. Patil, David H. Ward
2025, Open-File Report 2025-1007
The U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have developed a three-tiered strategy for monitoring eelgrass (Zostera marina) beds at Izembek Lagoon, Alaska, that targets different spatial and temporal scales. The broadest-scale monitoring (tier-1) uses satellite imagery about every 5 years to delineate the spatial extent of...
Characterization of the long-distance dispersal kernel of white-tailed deer and evaluating its impact on chronic wasting disease spread in Wisconsin
Gouda V. Mennatallah, Jim Powell, Jen McClure, Daniel P. Walsh, Daniel J. Storm
2025, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (87)
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease infecting cervids. It is highly contagious and caused by misfolded prions that propagate via templated conformational conversion of the cervid’s normal prion protein. Prevalence of CWD in free-ranging deer in North America is mostly low, but in some regions local prevalence...
Biocrust mosses and cyanobacteria exhibit distinct carbon uptake responses to variations in precipitation amount and frequency
Kristina E. Young, Osvaldo E. Sala, Anthony Darrouzet-Nardi, Colin L Tucker, Rebecca A Finger-Higgens, Megan Elyse Starbuck, Sasha C. Reed
2025, Ecology Letters (28)
Dryland organisms exhibit varied responses to changes in precipitation, including event size, frequency, and soil moisture duration, influencing carbon uptake and reserve management strategies. This principle, central to the pulse-reserve paradigm, has not been thoroughly evaluated in biological soil crusts (biocrusts), essential primary producers on dryland surfaces. We conducted two...
Calibration of the Stream Salmonid Simulator (S3) model to estimate annual survival, movement, and food consumption by juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) in the restoration reach of the Trinity River, California, 2006–18
John M. Plumb, Russell W. Perry, Kyle De Juilio
2025, Open-File Report 2024-1070
Executive SummaryThe Trinity River is managed in two sections: (1) from the upper 64-kilometer “restoration reach” downstream from Lewiston Dam to the confluence with the North Fork Trinity River, and (2) the 120-kilometer lower Trinity River downstream from the restoration reach. The Stream Salmonid Simulator (S3) has been previously applied...
New technology for an ancient fish: A lamprey life cycle modeling tool with an R Shiny application
Dylan Gerald-Everett Gomes, Joseph R. Benjamin, Benjamin J. Clemens, Ralph Lampman, Jason B. Dunham
2025, PLoS ONE (20)
Lampreys (Petromyzontiformes) are an ancient group of fishes with complex life histories. We created a life cycle model that includes an R Shiny interactive web application interface to simulate abundance by life stage. This will allow scientists and managers to connect available demographic information in a framework that can be...
Regional analysis of the dependence of peak-flow quantiles on climate with application to adjustment to climate trends
Thomas M. Over, Mackenzie K. Marti, Hannah Lee Podzorski
2025, Hydrology (12)
Standard flood-frequency analysis methods rely on an assumption of stationarity, but because of growing understanding of climatic persistence and concern regarding the effects of climate change, the need for methods to detect and model nonstationary flood frequency has become widely recognized. In this study, a regional statistical method for estimating...
The Hardscrabble Creek complex: A newly discovered, mostly buried, Mesoproterozoic mafic-ultramafic pluton in the Wet Mountains, Colorado, USA
Benjamin Patrick Magnin, Sandra S. Brake, Yvette Kuiper, Michael T. Mohr, Richard E. Hanson
2025, GSA Bulletin (137) 4558-4574
The origin of prolific ca. 1.4 Ga ferroan magmatism between the southwestern USA and eastern Canada is enigmatic and has been explained by various models, including extensional, mantle plume, and convergent plate-margin models. Rare mafic plutons are associated with the ferroan plutons, which may help constrain their mantle source and...
