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Exploration of water resources is needed for public supply, extraction of mineral resources, and economic development in Afghanistan. Remotely-sensed data are useful for identifying the general nature of surface sediments, however, “boots on the ground” geophysical surveys or drilling programs are needed to quantify the thickness of sediments or aquifers....

Modern seismology has been able to take advantage of several technological advances. These include feedback loops in the seismometer, specialized digitizers with absolute timing, and compression formats for storing data. While all of these advances have helped to improve the field, they can also leave newcomers a bit...

Endemic species face a variety of threats including predation from non‐native invaders. In some cases, however, invasive species can be managed by directly suppressing populations, and tracking technologies that allow researchers to identify movement patterns and aggregations representative of the population can facilitate suppression activities. In Yellowstone Lake (Yellowstone National...

Migrating waterbirds moving between upper and lower latitudinal breeding and wintering grounds rely on a limited network of endorheic lakes and wetlands when crossing arid continental interiors. Recent drying of global endorheic water stores raises concerns over deteriorating migratory pathways, yet few studies have considered these effects at the scale...

Historical cross-shore positions of the shoreline and dune base were used as inputs for a Kalman filter algorithm to forecast the positions of these features in the year 2028. The beach width was also computed as the cross-shore distance between the forecasted 2028 shoreline and dune-base positions. While it does...

Large earthquakes like in Wenchuan in 2008, MW 7.9, Sichuan, China, provide opportunity for earthquake early warning (EEW) as many heavily shaken areas are far (~50 km) from the epicenter and warning time could be long enough (≥ 5 s) to take effective preventative action. On the other hand, earthquakes...

This report presents data on the approximate locations and methods of discovery of 530 polar bear (Ursus maritimus) maternal dens observed in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas and neighboring areas from 1910 to 2018, and archived partly by the U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Science Center, and partly by the...

The US Geological Survey (USGS) “Did You Feel It?”® (DYFI) system is an automated system for rapidly collecting macroseismic intensity data from Internet users’ shaking and damage reports and generating intensity maps immediately following earthquakes.Although the collection and assignment of DYFI-based Macroseismic Intensity (MI) data...

Bogoslof volcano, Alaska, experienced at least 70 explosive eruptions between 12 December 2016 and 31 August 2017. Due to its remote location and limited local monitoring network, this eruption was monitored and characterized primarily using remote geophysical and satellite techniques. SO2 emissions from Bogoslof were persistently detected...

Reduced representation (RRL) sequencing approaches (e.g., RADSeq, genotyping by sequencing) require decisions about how much to invest in genome coverage and sequencing depth, as well as choices of values for adjustable bioinformatics parameters. To empirically explore the importance of these “simple” methodological decisions, we generated two independent sequencing libraries for the same 142 individual...

We mapped tidal wetland gross primary production (GPP) with unprecedented detail for multiple wetland types across the continental United States (CONUS) at 16‐day intervals for the years 2000–2019. To accomplish this task, we developed the spatially explicit Blue Carbon (BC) model, which combined tidal wetland cover and field‐based eddy covariance...

The use of animal-born sensors for location-based tracking and bio-logging in terrestrial systems has expanded dramatically in the past 10 years. This rapid expansion has generated new data on how animals interact with and respond to variation in their environment, resulting in important ecological, physiological, and evolutionary insights. Although...

Life in the Arctic presents organisms with multiple challenges, including extreme photic conditions, cold temperatures, and annual loss and daily movement of sea ice. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) evolved under these unique conditions, where they rely on ice to hunt their main prey, seals. However, very little is known about...

Integrated, multi-method provenance studies of siliciclastic sedimentary deposits are increasingly used to reconstruct the history of source-to-sink transport, paleogeography, and tectonics. Invariably, analysis of large-scale depositional systems must confront issues regarding how to best sample the system and adequately cope with the details of sediment mixing. Potential biases including...

The Alabama Barrier Island Restoration Assessment project focused exclusively on Dauphin Island, a significant barrier island along the northern Gulf of Mexico. This restoration feasibility study effort required data collection and analysis of many data types (e.g., hydro, sediment, currents, etc.) through the project’s life cycle to assess restoration measures...

Bees play a key role in the functioning of human-modified and natural ecosystems by pollinating agricultural crops and wild plant communities. Global pollinator conservation efforts need large-scale and long-term monitoring to detect changes in species’ demographic patterns and shifts in bee community structure. The objective of this project was to...

Pallid sturgeon Scaphirhynchus albus (Forbes & Richardson, 1905, Bulletin of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History, 1905, 7, 37) are an endangered riverine sturgeon native to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and declining numbers have been attributed to multiple stressors, including habitat loss and alteration. The lower Mississippi River provides a...

Water quality and quantity can be influenced by transit through and storage in reservoirs. Assessing such effects can be challenging, however, because of mixing and residence times, and inter-annual net storage and release from both the reservoir itself and surrounding porosity. Here, different methodologies were used to assess the effect...

The Mississippi Barrier Islands in the northern Gulf of Mexico experienced high rates of spatial change over recorded history. Wave-induced sediment transport induced island migration, landward retreat, and inlet evolution. These processes can be measured using repeat bathymetric surveys to analyze elevation change over time. This study analyzes digital elevation...

Upper Klamath Lake (UKL) is the source of the Klamath river that flows through southern Oregon and northern California. The UKL basin is home to two endangered species and provides water for 81,000+ ha (200,000+ acres) of irrigation on the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) Klamath Project located downstream...

The three sets of ground‐motion predictions (GMPs) of Boore (2018; hereafter, B18) are compared with a much larger dataset than was used in deriving the predictions. The B18 GMPs work well for response spectra at periods between &#x223C;0.15"><span id="MathJax-Span-39"...

The 2019 M6.4 and M7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence occurred in the eastern California shear zone (ECSZ). The mainshock ruptured the Little Lake fault zone and aftershocks extended from the Garlock fault in the south, to the southern end of the 1872 M7.5 Owens Valley earthquake rupture in the north. We present data from...

The selection and weighting of ground‐motion models (GMMs) introduces a significant source of uncertainty in U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project (NSHMP) forecasts. In this study, we evaluate 18 candidate GMMs using instrumental ground‐motion observations of horizontal peak ground acceleration (PGA) and 5%‐damped pseudospectral acceleration (0.02–10 s) for...

The geomorphological formation of the Baja California peninsula and the Gulf of California is a principal driver of diversification for the reptiles of North America’s warm deserts. The western banded gecko, Coleonyx variegatus, is distributed throughout the Mojave, Sonoran and Peninsular deserts. In this study we use multilocus sequence data to...

Detection has been a long-standing challenge to monitoring populations of cryptic herpetofauna, which often have detection probabilities that are closer to zero than one. Burmese Pythons (Python bivittatus =Python molurus bivittatus), a recent invader in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem of Florida, are cryptic snakes that have long periods of inactivity....