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Industrial chemical contamination within coastal regions of the Great Lakes can pose serious risks to wetland habitat and offshore fisheries, often resulting in fish consumption advisories that directly affect human and wildlife health. Mercury (Hg) is a contaminant of concern in many of these highly urbanized...

Watershed degradation due to invasion threatens downstream water flows and associated ecosystem services. While this topic has been studied across landscapes that have undergone invasive-driven state changes (e.g., native forest to invaded grassland), it is less well understood in ecosystems experiencing within-system invasion (e.g. native forest...

We compared body morphology of two freshwater sculpin taxa that inhabit distinct environmental conditions in the Chesapeake Bay watershed of eastern North America: Potomac sculpin (C. girardi, Robins; PS) and checkered sculpin (C. sp. cf. girardi; CS). Both taxa are endemic to the study area, but PS are more broadly distributed than...

Regionally scaled assessments of hydrologic alteration for small streams and its effects on freshwater taxa are often inhibited by a low number of stream gages. To overcome this limitation, we paired modeled estimates of hydrologic alteration to a benthic macroinvertebrate index of biotic integrity data for 4522 stream reaches across...

Daily mean discharge records are needed for management of selected streams in the Fortymile River Basin. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, updated a technique for estimating seasonal (partial year) discharge at two short-record streamgage sites in the basin and evaluated the...

The benthic foraminifers Bulimina denudata and Eggerelloides advenus are commonly abundant in offshore regions in the Pacific Ocean, especially in waste-discharge sites. The relationship between their abundance and standard macrofaunal sediment toxicity tests (amphipod survival and sea urchin fertilization) as well as sediment chemistry analyte measurements were determined for sediments collected in...

The Round Goby Neogobius melanostomus has spread rapidly around the Great Lakes region since its introduction to North America in 1990. In 2014, a specimen was captured in the New York State Canal System west of Utica, prompting concerns that Round Goby would soon reach the ecologically and...

The Gulf of Alaska forage fish community includes a few key species that differ markedly in their timing of spawning, somatic growth and lipid storage, and in their migration behavior. This diversity in life history strategies facilitates resilience in marine food webs because it buffers predators against the naturally high...

We use over 100 in situ and remotely sensed temperature datasets to investigate thermal variability within and across the intertidal nearshore, coastal and offshore waters of the northern Gulf of Alaska. For the years 1970 through 2019 we document a warming trend of 0.24±0.10 °C per decade for the coastal...

Respiration in intertidal salt marshes generates dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) that is exported to the coastal ocean by tidal exchange with the marsh platform. Understanding the link between physical drivers of water exchange and chemical flux is a key to constraining coastal wetland contributions to regional...

In coarse resolution hydrological modeling we face the problem of subgrid variability, the effects of which are difficult to express and are often hidden in the parameterization and calibration. We present a numerical experiment with the physically based hydrological model ParFlow‐CLM with which we quantify the effect of subgrid heterogeneities...

Nothonotus moorei (Yellowcheek Darter [YCD]) is an endangered species endemic to the headwaters of the Little Red River in north-central Arkansas. Population decline, habitat loss and fragmentation, and threats from land use and seasonal drought necessitate monitoring of population density and distribution to determine ecological and habitat associations. We evaluated YCD...

The ShakeAlert® earthquake early warning system has been live since October 2019 for the testing of public alerting to mobile devices in California and will soon begin testing this modality in Oregon and Washington. The Pacific Northwest presents new challenges and opportunities for ShakeAlert owing to the different types of...

The St. Clair-Detroit River System contains a world-class Great Lakes muskellunge (Esox masquinongy) fishery that has avoided the declines observed in many Great Lakes muskellunge populations. Muskellunge are an upper trophic level predator, and therefore a naturally low-density species. Limited fishery-independent data exist on which to base management decisions. To...

Improved analytical methods can quantify hundreds of pesticide transformation products (TPs), but understanding of TP occurrence and potential toxicity in aquatic ecosystems remains limited. We quantified 108 parent pesticides and 116 TPs in more than 3 700 samples from 442 small streams in mostly urban basins across five major regions of...

Phosphorus (P) loadings to the Great Lakes have been regulated for decades, but re-eutrophication and seasonal hypoxia have recently been increasingly reported. It is of paramount importance to better understand the fate, transformation, and biogeochemical cycling processes of different P species across the river-lake interface....

Hawai'i's endangered waterbirds have experienced epizootics caused by ingestion of prey that accumulated a botulinum neurotoxin produced by the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium botulinum (avian botulism; Type C). Waterbird carcasses, necrophagous flies, and their larvae initiate and spread avian botulism, a food-borne paralytic disease lethal to waterbirds. Each new carcass has potential to...

Levels of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) are commonly assessed using a modified garden rake. However, the utility of the rake sampling method relative to methods that are typically viewed as more definitive (and expensive) such as snorkeling and coring remains a matter of debate. This study explores whether probabilities of...

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are well-studied and inhabit diverse landscapes that are being transformed by both humans and natural forces. Most tools currently in use are limited in their ability to predict how elephants will respond to novel changes in the environment. Individual-, or agent-based modeling (ABM), may extend current methods in...

Seasonal snow cover in the dry forests of the American West provides essential water resources to both human and natural systems. The structure of trees and their arrangement across the landscape are important drivers of snow cover distribution across these forests, varying widely in both space and time. We used...

Montane meadows are areas of high biodiversity and provide many important ecosystem services; however, degradation of 40–60% of these habitats in the Sierra Nevada region of California has left many of these areas impaired. The “pond-and-plug” meadow-restoration technique is 1 type of treatment implemented...

We present a comprehensive critical review of well-established satellite remote sensing water indices and offer a novel, robust Augmented Normalized Difference Water Index (ANDWI). ANDWI employs an expanded set of spectral bands, RGB, NIR, and SWIR1-2, to maximize the contrast between water and non-water pixels. Further, we implement a dynamic thresholding method, the...

Concepts like the 100-year flood event can be misleading if they are not updated to reflect significant changes over time. Here, we model observed annual maximum daily streamflow using a nonstationary approach to provide the first global picture of changes in: (a) the magnitudes of the 20-,...

Multiple studies have reported widespread browning of Northern Hemisphere lakes. Most examples are from boreal lakes that have experienced limited human influence, and browning has alternatively been attributed to changes in atmospheric deposition, climate, and land use. To determine the extent and possible causes of browning...

Regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) methods are essential tools to assess flood hazard and plan interventions for its mitigation. They are used to estimate flood quantiles when the at‐site record of streamflow data is not available or limited. One commonly used RFFA method is the index flood method (IFM), which...