Nearshore survey and cleanup of benthic marine debris using citizen science divers along the Mediterranean coast of Israel
Galia Pasternak, Christine Ribic, Ehud Spanier, Asaf Ariel, Boaz Mayzel, Sarah Ohayon, Dov Zviely
2019, Ocean and Coastal Management (175) 17-32
Information on marine debris along the Mediterranean coast of Israel, especially on the seafloor, is limited. Many recreational divers are enthusiasts of marine conservation and can thus contribute to data collection which does not require highly specialized training. The Society for...
Estimating quick-flow runoff at the monthly timescale for the conterminous United States
Meredith Reitz, Ward E. Sanford
2019, Journal of Hydrology (573) 841-854
The quantitative estimation of the quick-flow runoff component of streamflow is required for many hydrologic applications. Estimation at the monthly timescale and national spatial scale would be particularly useful for national water availability modeling. This paper reviews a sample of commonly used equations for quick-flow runoff, including several currently in...
Annual wastewater nutrient data preparation and load estimation using the Point Source Load Estimation Tool (PSLoadEsT)
Lillian E. Gorman Sanisaca, Kenneth D. Skinner, Molly A. Maupin
2019, Open-File Report 2019-1025
The Point-Source Load Estimation Tool (PSLoadEsT) provides a user-friendly interface for generating reproducible load calculations for point source dischargers while managing common data challenges including duplicates, incompatible input tables, and incomplete or missing nutrient concentration or effluent flow data. Maintaining a consistent method across an entire study area is important...
Point-source nutrient loads to streams of the conterminous United States, 2012
Kenneth D. Skinner, Molly A. Maupin
2019, Data Series 1101
Total nitrogen and phosphorous loads were estimated for 5,430 major point-source facilities (all types) and 11,537 minor wastewater treatment facilities discharging to streams in the conterminous United States during 2012. Facilities classified as a major discharger are typically a facility that discharges greater than one million gallons of water...
Changes in breeding population sizes of double-crested Cormorants Phalacrocorax auritus in the Humboldt Bay area, California, 1924–2017
Phillip J. Capitolo, Harry R. Carter, Julie L. Yee, Gerard J. McChesney, Michael W Parker, Richard J Young, Richard T. Golightly, W Breck Tyler
2019, Marine Ornithology: Journal of Seabird Research and Conservation (47) 115-126
To better understand recent population growth of the Double-crested Cormorant Phalacrocorax auritus along the Pacific coast of North America, we assessed long-term breeding population trends in the Humboldt Bay area, California, using aerial photographic survey data collected since 1989 as well as available prior data. The earliest documentations of breeding (but without...
Terrestrial lidar data of the February 14, 2019 Sausalito Boulevard Landslide, Sausalito, California
Brian D. Collins, Skye C. Corbett
2019, Data Series 1112
On February 14, 2019, just before 2:56 am local time (Pacific Standard Time), a landslide initiated from the hillslopes above the Hurricane Gulch section of the City of Sausalito, Marin County, California. The landslide, specifically classified as a debris flow, overran a road (Sausalito Boulevard) immediately below the landslide source...
Potential sea level rise for the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana
Kathryn A. Spear, William Jones, Kereen Griffith, Blair E. Tirpak, Kimberly Walden
2019, Open-File Report 2019-1030
Situated in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain of the Gulf Coast Prairie Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GCP LCC), the Chitimacha Tribe is one of four federally recognized tribes in Louisiana. The Tribal seat, trust lands/ reservation, and adjacent Tribal owned lands are located near Charenton, Louisiana, totaling nearly 1,000 acres. The...
Spatial capture–recapture for categorically marked populations with an application to genetic capture–recapture
Ben C. Augustine, J. Andrew Royle, Sean M. Murphy, Richard B. Chandler, John J. Cox, Marcella Kelly
2019, Ecosphere (10)
Recently introduced unmarked spatial capture–recapture (SCR), spatial mark–resight (SMR), and 2‐flank spatial partial identity models (SPIMs) extend the domain of SCR to populations or observation systems that do not always allow for individual identity to be determined with certainty. For example, some species do not have natural marks that can...
Relative prediction intervals reveal larger uncertainty in 3D approaches to predictive digital soil mapping of soil properties with legacy data
Travis Nauman, Michael C. Duniway
2019, Geoderma (347) 170-184
Fine scale maps of soil properties enable efficient land management and inform earth system models. Recent efforts to create soil property maps from field observations tend to use similar tree-based machine learning interpolation approaches, but often deal with depth of predictions, validation, and uncertainty differently. One of the main differences...
The contribution of road-based citizen science to the conservation of pond-breeding amphibians
Sean Sterrett, Rachel A. Katz, William R. Fields, Evan H. Campbell Grant
2019, Journal of Applied Ecology (56) 988-995
Roadside amphibian citizen science (CS) programmes bring together volunteers focused on collecting scientific data while working to mitigate population declines by reducing road mortality of pond‐breeding amphibians. Despite the international popularity of these movement‐based, roadside conservation efforts (i.e. “big nights,” “bucket brigades” and “toad patrols”), direct benefits to conservation...
Life-history model for sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) at Lake Ozette, northwestern Washington—Users' guide
Andrea Woodward, Mike Haggerty, Patrick Crain
2019, Open-File Report 2019-1031
Salmon populations spawning in the Lake Ozette watershed of northwestern Washington were once sufficiently abundant to support traditional Tribal fisheries, and were later harvested by settlers. However, in 1974 and 1975, the sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) harvest decreased to 0 from a high of more than 17,500 in 1949, thus...
Earth history and the passerine superradiation
Carl H Oliveros, Daniel J Field, Daniel T Ksepka, F Keith Barker, Alexandre Aleixo, Michael J Andersen, Per Alstrom, Brett W Benz, Edward L Braun, Michael J Braun, Gustavo A Bravo, Robb T Brumfield, Terry Chesser, Santiago Claramunt, Joel Cracraft, Andrés M. Cuervo, Elizabeth P. Derryberry, Travis C. Glenn, Michael G. Harvey, Peter A. Hosner, Leo Joseph, Rebecca Kimball, Andrew L. Mack, Colin M. Miskelly, A. Townsend Peterson, Mark B. Robbins, Frederick H. Sheldon, Luís Fábio Silveira, Brian T. Smith, Noor D. White, Robert G. Moyle, Brant C. Faircloth
2019, PNAS (116) 7916-7925
Avian diversification has been influenced by global climate change, plate tectonic movements, and mass extinction events. However, the impact of these factors on the diversification of the hyperdiverse perching birds (passerines) is unclear because family level relationships are unresolved and the timing of splitting events among lineages is uncertain. We...
Identifying occupancy model inadequacies: Can residuals separately assess detection and presence?
Wilson Wright, Kathryn M. Irvine, Megan D. Higgs
2019, Ecology (100)
Occupancy models are widely applied to estimate species distributions, but few methods exist for model checking. Thorough model assessments can uncover inadequacies and allow for deeper ecological insight by exploring structure in the observed data not accounted for by a model. We introduce occupancy model residual definitions that utilize the...
Status of pelagic prey fishes in Lake Michigan, 2018
David Warner, Kristy Phillips, Ben Turschak, Dale Hanson, Jason Smith
2019, Conference Paper
Acoustic surveys were conducted in late summer/early fall during the years 2004-2018 to estimate pelagic prey fish biomass in Lake Michigan. Midwater trawling during the surveys as well as acoustic target strength provided a measure of species and size composition of the fish community for use in scaling acoustic data...
Geospatial data mining for digital raster mapping
Bruce K. Wylie, Neal J. Pastick, Joshua J. Picotte, Carol Deering
2019, GIScience and Remote Sensing (56) 406-429
We performed an in-depth literature survey to identify the most popular data mining approaches that have been applied for raster mapping of ecological parameters through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remotely sensed data. Popular data mining approaches included decision trees or “data mining” trees which consist of...
Upper mantle earth structure in Africa from full-wave ambient noise tomography
Erica L. Emry, Yang Shen, Andrew A. Nyblade, Ashton F. Flinders, Xueyang Bao
2019, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (20) 120-147
Our understanding of the tectonic development of the African continent and the interplay between its geological provinces is hindered by unevenly distributed seismic instrumentation. In order to better understand the continent, we used long-period ambient noise full waveform tomography on data collected from 186 broadband seismic stations throughout Africa and...
Development of a quantitative PCR method for screening ichthyoplankton samples for bigheaded carps
Andrea K. Fritts, Brent C. Knights, James H. Larson, Jon Amberg, Christopher M. Merkes, Tariq Tajjioui, Steven E. Butler, Matthew J. Diana, David H. Wahl, Michael J. Weber, John D. Waters
2019, Biological Invasions (21) 1143-1153
Monitoring ichthyoplankton is useful for identifying reproductive fronts and spawning locations of bigheaded carps (Hypophthalmichthys spp.). Unfortunately, sorting and identifying ichthyoplankton to monitor for bigheaded carp reproduction is time consuming and expensive. Traditional methods require frequent egg-larvae sampling, sorting of all samples to obtain presumptively identified bigheaded carp, and genetic...
A novel method to characterise levels of pharmaceutical pollution in large scale aquatic monitoring campaigns
John W. Wilkinson, Alistair Boxall, Dana Kolpin
2019, Applied Sciences (9)
Much of the current understanding of pharmaceutical pollution in the aquatic environment is based on research conducted in Europe, North America and other select high-income nations. One reason for this geographic disparity of data globally is the high cost and analytical intensity of the research, limiting accessibility to necessary equipment....
Assessing seasonal changes in microgravity at Yellowstone caldera
Michael P. Poland, Elske de Zeeuw-van Dalfsen
2019, Journal of Geophysical Research (124) 4174-4188
Microgravity time series at active volcanoes can provide an indication of mass change related to subsurface magmatic processes, but uncertainty is often introduced by hydrologic variations and other noise sources that cannot easily be isolated. We empirically assessed seasonality and noise by conducting four surveys over the course of...
Simulating the effects of climate variability on waterbodies and wetland-dependent birds in the Prairie Pothole Region
N.E. Mcintyre, G. Liu, J. Gorzo, C.K. Wright, Glenn R. Guntenspergen, F. Schwartz
2019, Ecosphere (10) 1-18
Understanding how bird populations respond to changes in waterbody availability in the climatically variable Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America hinges on being able to couple hydrological and climate modeling to represent potential future landscapes. Model experiments run with the Pothole Complex Hydrologic Model using...
Investigation of recent decadal-scale cyclical fluctuations in salinity in the lower Colorado river
Fred D. Tillman, Alissa L. Coes, David W. Anning, Jon P. Mason, Tyler B. Coplen
2019, Journal of Environmental Management 442-452
Beginning in the late 1970s, 10- to 15-year cyclical oscillations in salinity were observed at lower Colorado River monitoring sites, moving upstream from the international border with Mexico, above Imperial Dam, below Hoover Dam, and at Lees Ferry. The cause of these cyclical...
Geology of the Mineral and Lake Anna West Quadrangles, Virginia
Mark W. Carter, William C. Burton, Ryan J. McAleer, Mary DiGiacomo-Cohen, R. Tyler Sauer
2019, Virginia Division of Geology and Mineral Resources Publication 189
This map product is a cooperator series publication and, as such, does not have a specific abstract. Geologic mapping for this map product was completed between 2014 and 2017, with most of the field work occurring between January 2016 and May 2017. Numerous foot traverses were completed along creeks and roads...
Windows to the deep 2018: Exploration of the southeast US Continental margin
Leslie R Sautter, Cheryl L. Morrison, Kasey Cantwell, Derek Sowers, Elizabeth Lobecker
2019, Oceanography (32) 82-87
Windows to the Deep 2018: Exploration of the Southeast US Continental Margin was a 36-day expedition aboard NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer to acquire data on priority exploration areas identified by the ocean management and scientific communities. This expedition involved high-resolution multibeam sonar mapping and ROV dives, ranging from 340 m...
Assessing rangeland health under climate variability and change
John B. Bradford, Michael C. Duniway, Seth M. Munson
2019, Book chapter, Grasslands and climate change
RANGELAND HEALTH IN A CHANGING WORLD Rangeland health is an integrated metric that describes a complex suite of ecosystem properties and processes as applied to resource management. While the concept of “healthy” landscapes has a long history, the term “rangeland health” was codified in the US in 1994 as part...
A revised continuous surface elevation model for modeling
Rueen-Fang Wang, Eli Ateljevich, Theresa A. Fregoso, Bruce E. Jaffe
2019, Book chapter, Methodology for flow and salinity estimates in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh, 39th Annual Progress Report to the State Water Resources Control Board
A digital elevation model (DEM) is an essential component of any hydrodynamic model. The Delta Modeling Section (Section) has maintained a database of bathymetry soundings and levee surveys for decades and published a 10-meter (10m) DEM for the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) (California Department of Water...
