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Millette et al. (Ecology Letters, 2020, 23:55–67) reported no consistent worldwide anthropogenic effects on animal genetic diversity using repurposed mitochondrial DNA sequences. We reexamine data from this study, describe genetic marker and scale limitations which might lead to misinterpretations with conservation implications, and provide advice to improve...

Elevation is a major driver of plant ecology and sediment dynamics in tidal wetlands, so accurate and precise spatial data are essential for assessing wetland vulnerability to sea-level rise and making forecasts. We performed survey-grade elevation and vegetation surveys of the Global Change Research Wetland, a brackish microtidal wetland...

Accurately quantifying rates and patterns of biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) in terrestrial ecosystems is essential to characterize ecological and biogeochemical interactions, identify mechanistic controls, improve BNF representation in conceptual and numerical modelling, and forecast nitrogen limitation constraints on future carbon (C) cycling.While many resources address the technical advantages and...

Groundwater models have evolved to encompass more aspects of the water cycle, but the incorporation of realistic boundary conditions representing surface water remains time-consuming and error-prone. We present two Python packages that robustly automate this process using readily available hydrography data as the primary input. SFRmaker...

The U.S. Geological Survey monitors a suite of intertidal black abalone sites at San Nicolas Island, California, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, which owns the island. The nine rocky intertidal sites were established in 1980 to study the potential impact of translocated sea otters on the intertidal black abalone...

With declining capture fisheries production, maintaining nutrient supplies largely hinges on substituting wild fish with economically comparable farmed animals. Although such transitions are increasingly commonplace across global inland and coastal communities, their nutritional consequences are unknown. Here, using human demographic and health information, and fish nutrient composition data from the...

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) is the scientific foundation of seismic design regulations in the United States and is regularly updated to consider the best available science and data. The 2018 update of the conterminous US NSHM includes major changes to the underlying ground...

The University of Kentucky (U KY) has owned Robinson Forest (37.460723° N, 83.158598° W) since 1923, conducting experiments crucial to understanding the environmental effects of land management in the region. Part of the management of Robinson Forest has been collection of environmental data, including precipitation quantity, bulk‐deposition chemistry, streamflow, stream‐water...

Recent production of light sweet oil has prompted reevaluation of Devonian petroleum systems in the central Appalachian Basin. Upper Devonian Ohio Shale (lower Huron Member) and Middle Devonian Marcellus Shale organic-rich source rocks from eastern Ohio and nearby areas were examined using organic petrography and geochemical analysis of solvent extracts...

As part of a study to determine the origin of oil and gas in the Berea Sandstone in northeastern Kentucky and southeastern Ohio, 158 samples of organic-rich shale from the Upper Devonian Olentangy and Ohio Shales and the Lower Mississippian Sunbury Shale, collectively referred to as the “black shale,”...

Shallow production of sweet high-gravity oil from the Upper Devonian Berea Sandstone in northeastern Kentucky has caused the region to become the leading oil producer in the state. Potential nearby source rocks, namely, the overlying Mississippian Sunbury Shale and underlying Ohio Shale, are immature for commercial oil generation according to...

AimNumerous glacial refugia have been hypothesized along North America's North Pacific Coast that may have increased divergence of refugial taxa, leading to elevated endemism and subsequently clustered hybrid zones following deglaciation. The locations and community composition of these ice‐free areas remains controversial, but whole‐genome sequences now enable...

Riverbeds are hotspots for microbially-mediated reactions that exhibit pronounced variability in space and time. It is challenging to resolve biogeochemical mechanisms in natural riverbeds, as uncontrolled settings complicate data collection and interpretation. To overcome these challenges, laboratory flumes are often used as proxies for natural riverbed systems. Flumes capture spatiotemporal...

Spatial cross-correlation among flood sequences impacts the accuracy of regional predictors. Our study investigates this impact for two regionalization procedures, generalized least squares (GLS) regression and top-kriging (TK), which deal with cross-correlation in two fundamentally different ways and therefore might be associated with different accuracy and uncertainty...

Anthropogenic impacts on the landscape can drive biotic homogenization, whereby distinct biological communities become more similar to one another over time. Land-use change in the Southern Appalachian region is expected to result in homogenization of the highly diverse freshwater fish communities as in-stream habitat alterations favor widespread cosmopolitan...

The 2018 eruption on the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea Volcano produced one of the largest and most destructive lava flows in Hawai’i during the past 200 years. Over the course of more than 3 months, twenty-four fissures erupted, and the rate of lava effusion varied by two orders...

Data collection, along with hydraulic and fluvial egg transport modeling, was completed along a 70.9-mile reach of the Ohio River between Markland Locks and Dam and McAlpine Locks and Dam in Kentucky and Indiana. Water-quality data collected in this reach included surface measurements and vertical profiles of water temperature, specific...

BackgroundFloods are one of the most costly and frequent natural disasters in Nevada. For example, the 1997 New Year’s flood has been estimated to have caused more than $1 billion in damage across northern Nevada (Truckee River Flood Management Authority, 2017). In 2014, more than 2 miles of Interstate 15...

Arsenic from geologic sources is widespread in groundwater within the United States (U.S.). In several areas, groundwater arsenic concentrations exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maximum contaminant level of 10 μg per liter (μg/L). However, this standard applies only to public-supply...

Barrier coasts, including barrier islands, beach-ridge plains, and associated landforms, can assume a broad spectrum of morphologies over multi-decadal scales that reflect conditions of sediment availability, accommodation, and relative sea-level rise. However, the quantitative thresholds of these controls on barrier-system behavior remain largely unexplored, even as modern sea-level rise and...

Freshly erupted volcanic ash contains a range of soluble elements, some of which can generate harmful effects in living cells and are considered potentially toxic elements (PTEs). This work investigates the leaching dynamics of ash-associated PTEs in order to optimize a method for volcanic...

Sexual segregation has been intensely studied across diverse ecosystems and taxa, but studies are often limited to periods when animals occupy distinct seasonal ranges. Some avian and marine studies have revealed that habitat segregation, when sexes differ spatially or temporally in use of the physical landscape,...

Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Cuckoo; Coccyzus americanus) populations continue to decline in the western United States despite efforts to increase availability of riparian forest. Cuckoos have unique breeding habitat requirements such as large contiguous tracts of riparian forest (>80 ha), large estimated home ranges (20–90 ha), and dense vertical structure around the nest. However,...

Wildlife biologists monitor the status and trends of American woodcock Scolopax minor populations in the eastern and central United States and Canada via a singing-ground survey, conducted just after sunset along roadsides in spring. Annual analyses of the survey produce estimates of trend and annual indexes of abundance for 25 states and...

In April 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) released its recovery plan for the jaguar Panthera onca after several decades of discussion, litigation and controversy about the status of the species in the USA. The USFWS estimated that potential habitat, south of the Interstate-10 highway in Arizona and New...