A conceptual site model of contaminant transport pathways from the Bremerton Naval Complex to Sinclair Inlet, Washington, 2011–21
Kathleen E. Conn, Sarah E. Janssen, Chad C. Opatz, Valerie A.L. Bright
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5011
Historical activities on the Bremerton Naval Complex (BNC) in Puget Sound, Washington, have resulted in Sinclair Inlet sediments with elevated concentrations of contaminants, including organic contaminants such as polychlorinated biphenyls and trace elements including mercury. Six U.S. Geological Survey–U.S. Navy datasets have been collected since the last major assessment, in...
At-a-Glance—Summary of the 2023 U.S. Geological Survey Cooperative Research Units Program Year-in-Review
Caroline E. Murphy, Elise R. Irwin, Dawn E. Childs, Donald E. Dennerline, Jonathan R. Mawdsley
2024, Fact Sheet 2024-3006
IntroductionEstablished in 1935, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units (CRU) program is a unique partnership among the USGS, State Fish and Wildlife agencies, host universities, the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). As of 2023, there are 43 CRUs...
Novel data in recreation monitoring—Summary proceedings from interagency workshops in 2019 and 2023
Emily J. Wilkins, Christian S.L. Crowley, Eric M. White, Spencer A. Wood, Rudy Schuster
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5013
Two interagency workshops were held in 2019 and 2023 in Fort Collins, Colorado, to discuss the use of novel data in recreation monitoring. During the workshops, the phrase “novel data in recreation monitoring” was primarily used to refer to data from social media, mobile device applications, and other online secondary...
Evaluation of groundwater resources in the Upper White River Basin within Mount Rainier National Park, Washington state, 2020
Leland T. Fuhrig, Andrew J. Long, Alexander O. Headman
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5015
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the National Park Service, investigated groundwater gains and losses on the upper White River within Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. This investigation was conducted using stream discharge measurements at 14 locations within 7 reaches over a 6.5-mile river length from near...
Linking temperature sensitivity of mangrove communities, populations and individuals across a tropical-temperate transitional zone
Yiyang Kang, David A. Kaplan, Michael Osland
2024, Journal of Ecology (112) 1256-1274
Climate change is reshaping coastal wetlands worldwide, driving ecosystem shifts like mangrove poleward expansion into saltmarshes in tropical-temperate transitional zones. Though warming is recognized as the primary driver, a lack of detailed field studies limits our ability to predict mangrove responses to rapid climate warming.Here, we characterized how mangroves...
Noise constraints on global body‐wave measurement thresholds
Adam T. Ringler, David C. Wilson, Paul S. Earle, William L. Yeck, David B. Mason, Justin T. Wilgus
2024, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America
Intermediate sized earthquakes (≈M4–6.5) are often measured using the teleseismic body‐wave magnitude (mb). mb measurements are especially critical at the lower end of this range when teleseismic waveform modeling techniques (i.e., moment tensor analysis) are difficult. The U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) determines the...
Fair graph learning using constraint-aware priority adjustment and graph masking in river networks
Erhu He, Yiqun Xie, Alexander Y. Sun, Jacob Aaron Zwart, Jie Yang, Zhenong Jin, Yang Wang, Hassan Ali Karimi, Xiaowei Jia
2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (38) 22087-22095
Accurate prediction of water quality and quantity is crucial for sustainable development and human well-being. However, existing data-driven methods often suffer from spatial biases in model performance due to heterogeneous data, limited observations, and noisy sensor data. To overcome these challenges, we propose Fair-Graph, a novel graph-based recurrent neural network...
Association of water arsenic with incident diabetes in U.S. adults: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and The Strong Heart Study
Maya Spaur, Marta Galvez-Fernandez, Qixuan Chen, Melissa Lombard, Benjamin Bostick, Pam Factor-Litvak, Amanda Fretts, Steven Shea, Ana Navas-Acien, Anne E Nigra
2024, Diabetes Care (47) 1143-1151
OBJECTIVEWe examined the association of arsenic in federally regulated community water systems (CWSs) and unregulated private wells with type 2 diabetes (T2D) incidence in the Strong Heart Family Study (SHFS), a prospective study of American Indian communities, and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a prospective study of...
Greater sage-grouse habitat of Nevada and northeastern California—Integrating space use, habitat selection, and survival indices to guide areas for habitat management
Megan C. Milligan, Peter S. Coates, Shawn T. O'Neil, Brianne E. Brussee, Michael P. Chenaille, Derek Friend, Kathleen Steele, Justin R. Small, Timothy S. Bowden, Arlene D. Kosic, Katherine Miller
2024, Open-File Report 2024-1018
Executive SummaryGreater sage-grouse populations (Centrocercus urophasianus; hereafter sage-grouse) are threatened by a suite of disturbances and anthropogenic factors that have contributed to a net loss of sagebrush-dominant shrub cover in recent decades. Declines in sage-grouse populations are largely linked to habitat loss across their range. A key component of conservation...
The role of sediment ingestion in exposing bottom-feeding fish to chemical elements
W. Nelson Beyer, Alfred E. Pinkney
2024, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (43) 1036-1046
Digesta were collected from the intestines of seven species of bottom-feeding fish to better understand the role of incidental ingestion of sediment in exposing fish to inorganic contaminants. A composite sediment tracer variable, based on concentrations of Co, Cr, Ni, Ti, V, and Y in digesta and in sediment, was...
Environmental disturbances and restoration of salt marshes
Judith Weis, Lisamarie Windham-Myers
2024, Book chapter
Salt and brackish marshes (hereafter salt marshes) are the dominant coastal wetland in temperate and boreal intertidal settings. Human-enhanced disturbances threaten their persistence and functionality, with consequences to many ecosystem services. Restoration potentials are very site specific, varying by degree of disturbance and target goals. Global changes in climate and...
Seismic attenuation and stress on the San Andreas Fault at Parkfield: Are we critical yet?
Luca Malagnini, Robert M. Nadeau, Thomas E. Parsons
2024, Frontiers in Earth Science (12)
The Parkfield transitional segment of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) is characterized by the production of frequent quasi-periodical M6 events that break the very same asperity. The last Parkfield mainshock occurred on 28 September 2004, 38 years after the 1966 earthquake, and after the segment showed a ∼22 years average...
Differences in life history patterns of American shad, Alosa sapidissima, populations between ancestral, Atlantic coast, and non-native, Pacific coast rivers of North America
Thomas P. Quinn, Lisa Wetzel, Daniel J. Hasselman, Kimberly Larsen
2024, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (81) 862-878
Organisms naturalized outside their native range can reveal new life history patterns in new environments. Here, we compare life history patterns of American shad, Alosa sapidissima, from five rivers along the U.S. Pacific coast (introduced range) with contemporary data from the Atlantic coast source populations. The Pacific coast fish...
Improved efficient physics-based computational modeling of regional wave-driven coastal flooding for reef-lined coastlines
Camila Gaido-Lassarre, Kees Nederhoff, Curt Storlazzi, Borja Reguero, Michael W. Beck
2024, Journal of Marine Science & Engineering (198)
Coastal flooding affects low-lying communities worldwide and is expected to increase with climate change, especially along reef-lined coasts, where wave-driven flooding is particularly prevalent. However, current regional modeling approaches are either insufficient or too computationally expensive to accurately assess risks in...
Composite estimation to combine spatially overlapping environmental monitoring surveys
Steven Garman, Cindy L. Yu, Yuyang Li
2024, PLoS ONE (19)
Long-term environmental monitoring surveys are designed to achieve a desired precision (measured by variance) of resource conditions based on natural variability information. Over time, increases in resource variability and in data use to address issues focused on small areas with limited sample sizes require bolstering of...
The effects of wastewater reuse on smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) relative abundance in the Shenandoah River Watershed, USA
Tyler Wagner, Paul McLaughlin, Kaycee E. Faunce, Samuel H. Austin, Kelly Smalling
2024, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (43) 1138-1148
Municipal and industrial wastewater effluent is an important source of water for lotic systems, especially during periods of low flow. The accumulated wastewater effluent flows—expressed as a percentage of total streamflow (ACCWW%)—contain chemical mixtures that pose a risk to aquatic life; fish may be...
Groundwater model of the Harney Basin, southeastern Oregon
Stephen B. Gingerich, Darrick E. Boschmann, Gerald H. Grondin, Halley J Schibel
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5017
Groundwater development, mainly for large-scale irrigation, has increased substantially in the Harney Basin of southeastern Oregon since 2010. Concurrently, some areas of the basin experienced groundwater-level declines of more than 100 feet, and some shallow wells have gone dry. The Oregon Water Resources Department has limited new groundwater development in...
Monitoring aquifer-storage change from artificial recharge with repeat microgravity along Santa Cruz River, Tucson, Arizona, 2019–22
Libby M. Wildermuth, Jacob L. Conrad
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5115
The City of Tucson water utility, Tucson Water, began releasing treated effluent into the Santa Cruz River channel near downtown Tucson in 2019. This recharge project—the Heritage Project—is intended to create a reach of consistent flow in the channel and recharge water to the aquifer. Tracking the dispersal of recharged...
Seabed maps showing topography, ruggedness, backscatter intensity, sediment mobility, and the distribution of geologic substrates in quadrangle 5 of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary region offshore of Boston, Massachusetts
Page C. Valentine, VeeAnn A. Cross
2024, Scientific Investigations Map 3515
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the National Marine Sanctuary Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has conducted seabed mapping and related research in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) region since 1993. The area being mapped using geophysical and geological data includes the SBNMS and...
Assessing giant sequoia mortality and regeneration following high-severity wildfire
David Nicolas Bertil Soderberg, Adrian Das, Nathan L. Stephenson, Marc D. Meyer, Christy A. Brigham, Joshua Flickinger
2024, Ecosphere (15)
Fire is a critical driver of giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum [Lindl.] Buchholz) regeneration. However, fire suppression combined with the effects of increased temperature and severe drought has resulted in fires of an intensity and size outside of the historical norm. As a result, recent mega-fires...
The value of marsh restoration for flood risk reduction in an urban estuary
Rae M. Taylor-Burns, Chris Lowrie, Babak Tehranirad, Jeremy Lowe, Li H. Erikson, Patrick L. Barnard, Borja G. Reguero, Michael W. Beck
2024, Nature Climate Change (14)
The use of nature-based solutions (NBS) for coastal climate adaptation has broad and growing interest, but NBS are rarely assessed with the same rigor as traditional engineering solutions or with respect to future climate change scenarios. These gaps pose challenges for the use of NBS for...
Inoculated biocrust cover and functions diverged over a gradient of soil textures and water availability
Kristina E. Young, Sasha C. Reed, Michael Morton, Matthew A. Bowker
2024, Restoration Ecology
Restoring biological crust (biocrust) in disturbed drylands is challenging due to the difficult environmental conditions, such as limited soil moisture, low soil nutrients, and extreme temperatures, that impede growth. Understanding how the key components of biocrust—mosses, lichens, and cyanobacteria—react to different environmental factors informs...
Warm places, warm years, and warm seasons increase parasitizing of moose by winter ticks
Nicholas J. DeCesare, Richard B. Harris, M. P. Atwood, Eric A. Bergman, AB Courtemanch, Paul Cross, Gary Fralick, Kent Hersey, Mark A. Hurley, T Koser, Rebecca L. Levine, Kevin Monteith, Jesse Newby, Collin Peterson, Sarah M. Robertson, Benjamin Wise
2024, Ecosphere (15)
Observed links between parasites, such as ticks, and climate change have aroused concern for human health, wildlife population dynamics, and broader ecosystem effects. The one-host life history of the winter tick (Dermacentor albipictus) links each annual cohort to environmental conditions during three specific time...
Novel insights about petroleum systems from source and reservoir rock characterization, Cretaceous Deposits, Babouri-Figuil Basin, Northern Cameroon
Manga Gaspard, Javin J. Hatcherian, Paul C. Hackley, Moise Bessong, Carole Bapowa, Henry Pougue, Arsene Meying
2024, International Journal of Coal Geology (285)
The Babouri-Figuil Basin (BFB) is a frontier basin for petroleum in Cameroon. It belongs to the series of Cretaceous rift basins of the West and Central Rift System (WCARS), the origin of which is related to the opening of the South Atlantic. Within the same rift system, commercial hydrocarbon accumulations...
Characterizing future streamflows in Massachusetts using stochastic modeling—A pilot study
Scott A. Olson, Ghazal Shabestanipour, Jonathan Lamontagne, Scott Steinschneider
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5134
Communities throughout Massachusetts face the potential effects of climate change, ranging from more extreme rainfall to more pronounced and frequent droughts. Understanding the effects of climate change on hydrology is important to State and community officials to evaluate the potential effects on infrastructure and water systems. To better understand the...
