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Earthquake occurrence rates in some parts of the central United States have been elevated for a number of years; this increase has been widely attributed to deep wastewater injection associated with oil and gas activities. This induced seismicity has caused damage to buildings and infrastructure and substantial public concern. In...

Spatial and temporal variability characterize submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) assemblages, but understanding the complex interactions of environmental drivers of SAV assemblages remains elusive. We documented SAV composition and biomass across a salinity gradient in a coastal estuary over 12 mo. Ten macrophyte species were identified. The dominant species, Ceratophyllum demersum and Myriophyllum spicatum, accounted...

The newly constructed tallest building designed in conformance with performance-based design procedure in San Francisco, California is a 61-story building equipped with an accelerometric array that recorded the January 4, 2018 M4.4 Berkeley earthquake. The building is designed with concrete core shear walls and perimeter gravity steel...

A 3D geologic framework is presented here as part of the U.S. Geological Survey National Crustal Model for the western United States, which will be used to improve seismic hazard assessment. The framework is based on 1:250,000 to 1:1,000,000-scale state geologic maps and depths of multiple subsurface unit boundaries. The...

The city of Sioux Falls, in southeastern South Dakota, is the largest city in South Dakota. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the city of Sioux Falls, completed a groundwater-flow model to use for improving the understanding of groundwater-flow processes, estimating hydrogeologic properties, and analyzing groundwater and surface-water...

PurposeThe main purpose of this study was to demonstrate the utility of the sediment fingerprinting approach to apportion surface-derived sediment, and then age date that portion using short-lived fallout radionuclides. In systems where a large mass of mobile sediment is in channel storage, age dating provides an understanding...

During volcanic eruptions, model predictions of plume height are limited by the accuracy of entrainment coefficients used in many plume models. Typically, two parameters are used, α and β, which relate the entrained air speed to the jet speed in the axial and cross‐flow directions,...

How carbon cycles are regulated by environmental temperature remains a substantial uncertainty in our understanding of how watersheds will respond to ongoing climate change. Aquatic ecosystems are important components of carbon flux to the atmosphere and ocean, yet we have limited understanding of how temperature modifies ecosystem metabolic processes and,...

Public land managers have limited information to allow for the integration and balancing of multiple objectives in land management decisions including the social (cultural and health), economic (monetary and nonmonetary), and environmental aspects. In this article, we document an approach to consider the many facets of decision making by...

From 2015 through 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services studied occurrences of high levels of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria at the Pawtuckaway State Park Beach in Nottingham, New Hampshire. Historic...

Disturbance is a central driver of forest development and ecosystem processes with variable effects within and across ecosystems. Despite the high levels of variation in disturbance severity often observed in forests following natural and anthropogenic disturbance, studies quantifying disturbance impacts often rely on categorical classifications, thus limiting opportunities to...

Drought frequency and intensity are projected to increase throughout the southeastern USA, the natural range of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.), and are expected to have major ecological and economic implications. We analyzed the carbon and oxygen isotopic compositions in tree ring cellulose of loblolly pine in a factorial drought...

The traditional practice to assess accuracy in lidar data involves calculating RMSEz (root mean square error of the vertical component). Accuracy assessment of lidar point clouds in full 3D (dimension) is not routinely performed. The main challenge in assessing accuracy in full 3D is how to identify a conjugate point...

The 72-km-long Teton normal fault bounds the eastern base of the Teton Range in northwestern Wyoming, USA. Although geomorphic surfaces along the fault record latest Pleistocene to Holocene fault movement, the postglacial earthquake history of the fault has remained enigmatic. We excavated a paleoseismic trench at the Buffalo Bowl site...

Repeat sampling and age tracers were used to examine trends in nitrate, arsenic and uranium concentrations in groundwater beneath irrigated cropland. Much higher nitrate concentrations in shallow modern groundwater were observed at both the Columbia Plateau and High Plains sites (median values of 10.2 and 15.4 mg/L as N, respectively)...

Prairie-pothole wetlands provide the critical habitat necessary for supporting North American migratory waterfowl populations. However, climate and land-use change threaten the sustainability of these wetland ecosystems. Very few experiments and analyses have been designed to investigate the relative impacts of climate and land-use change drivers, as well as the antagonistic...

Many published studies in ecological science are viewed as stand-alone investigations that purport to provide new insights into how ecological systems behave based on single analyses. But it is rare for results of single studies to provide definitive results, as evidenced in current discussions of the “reproducibility crisis” in science....

In river channels the flow field influences the dispersion of biota, contaminants, and other suspended or dissolved materials. Insight on patterns and rates of dispersion can be gained by injecting a pulse of visible dye and observing spatial and temporal variations in dye concentration as the pulse moves downstream. We...

We develop a remote wave gauging technique to estimate wave height and period from imagery of waves in the surf zone. In this proof-of-concept study, we apply the same framework to three datasets: the first, a set of close-range monochrome infrared (IR)...

A modeling analysis is used to investigate the relative susceptibility of various hydrogeologic configurations to aseismic rupture generation due to deformation of aquifer systems accompanying groundwater pumping. An advanced numerical model (GEPS3D) is used to simulate rupture generation and propagation for three typical processes: (i) reactivation of a preexisting...

Large-scale assessments of rangeland runoff and erosion require methods to extend plot-scale parameterizations to large areas. In this study, Rangeland Hydrology and Erosion Model (RHEM) parameters were developed from plot-scale foliar and ground-cover transect data for an arid, grass-shrub rangeland in southern New Mexico, and a method was assessed to...

The Midcontinent population of sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) has historically been classified into 3 putative subspecies, but genetic analyses have identified only 2 genetically distinct subspecies. Previous studies have successfully used morphometrics in combination with an individual's sex to differentiate subspecies of sandhill cranes that had...

The Santa Barbara Area Coastal Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment (SBA CEVA) is a multidisciplinary research project that investigates future changes to southern Santa Barbara County climate, beaches, watersheds, wetland habitats and beach ecosystems. The target audience is local land use planners and decision makers. The main objective is to provide information that assists the Cities...

Identifying sources of sediment to streams in the Sprague River Basin, in south-central Oregon, is important for restoration efforts that are focused on reducing sediment erosion and transport. Reducing sediment loads in these streams also contributes to compliance with the total maximum daily load reduction requirements for total phosphorus...

The 2018 annual report of the U.S. Geological Survey Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center summarizes the work of the center, as well as the work of each of its science groups, highlights accomplishments of 2018, and includes a list of publications published in 2018. This product allows readers...