Evaluating tradeoffs in the response of Sora (Porzana carolina) and waterfowl to the timing of early autumn wetland inundation
Ariel M. Fournier, Doreen C. Mengel, Edward Gbur, Andy Raedeke, David G. Krementz
2019, Waterbirds (42) 168-178
Wetland loss has increased the importance of multi-species management in remaining wetlands, which provide habitat for a multitude of wetland-dependent species. Many public wetlands across the mid-latitude United States are managed as moist soil impoundments with emphasis on migratory waterfowl. However, how the timing of these water management decisions affects...
Spatial conservation planning under uncertainty: Adapting to climate change risks using modern portfolio theory
Mitchell J. Eaton, Simeon Yurek, Zulqarnain Haider, Julien Martin, Fred Johnson, Bradley Udell, Hadi Charkhgard, Changhyun Kwon
2019, Ecological Applications (29)
Climate change and urban growth impact habitats, species, and ecosystem services. To buffer against global change, an established adaptation strategy is designing protected areas to increase representation and complementarity of biodiversity features. Uncertainty regarding the scale and magnitude of landscape change complicates reserve planning and exposes decision makers to risk...
Flood-inundation maps for the Iowa River at the Meskwaki Settlement in Iowa, 2019
Charles V. Cigrand
2019, Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5050
Digital flood-inundation maps for a 9.3-mile reach of the Iowa River along the Meskwaki Settlement, Iowa, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa. The flood-inundation maps, which can be accessed through the USGS Flood Inundation Mapping...
Petrologic and mineral physics database for use with the U.S. Geological Survey National Crustal Model
Theron A. Sowers, Oliver S. Boyd
2019, Open-File Report 2019-1035
We present a petrologic and mineral physics database as part of the U.S. Geological Survey National Crustal Model (NCM). Each of 209 geologic units, 134 of which are currently part of the geologic framework within the NCM, was assigned a mineralogical composition according to generalized classifications with some refinement for...
Cerulean Warbler (Setophaga cerulea) response to operational silviculture in the central Appalachian region
Gretchen E. Nareff, Petra B. Wood, Donald J. Brown, Todd Fearer, Jeffery L. Larkin, W. Mark Ford
2019, Forest Ecology and Management (448) 409-423
The Cerulean Warbler (Setophaga cerulea) is a species of conservation need, with declines linked in part to forest habitat loss on its breeding grounds. Active management of forests benefit the Cerulean Warbler by creating the complex structural conditions preferred by the...
Groundwater movement and interaction with surface water near the confluence of the Platte and Elkhorn rivers, Nebraska, 2016–18
Christopher M. Hobza, Mason J. Johnson, Paul W. Woodward, Kellan R. Strauch, Aaron R. Schepers
2019, Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5048
The State of Nebraska requires a sustainable balance between long-term water supplies and uses of groundwater and surface water and requires Natural Resources Districts to include the effect of groundwater use on surface-water systems as part of their respective integrated management plans. Recent droughts in Nebraska (2000–6; 2012–13) have amplified...
Trends and carrying capacity of sea otters in Southeast Alaska
M. Tim Tinker, Verena A. Gill, George G. Esslinger, James L. Bodkin, Melissa Monk, Marc Mangel, Daniel Monson, Wendel W. Raymond, Michelle Kissling
2019, Journal of Wildlife Management (83) 1073-1089
Sea otter populations in Southeast Alaska (SEAK) have increased dramatically from fewer than 500 translocated animals in the late 1960s. The recovery of sea otters to ecosystems from which they had been absent has affected coastal food webs, including commercially important fisheries, and thus information on expected growth and equilibrium...
Satellite observations of surface deformation at the Coso Geothermal Field, California
Mariana Eneva, Andrew Barbour, David Adams, Vicky Hsiao, Kelly Blake, Giacomo Falorni, Roberto Locatelli
2019, Conference Paper, GRC Transactions
Surface deformation time series and rates are identified at the Coso Geothermal Field (CGF) and surrounding areas by applying interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to satellite scenes from Envisat (June 2004 ̶ October 2010) and Sentinel (November 2014 – April 2018). The measurements are done in the line...
Integrating behavior and physiology into strategies for amphibian conservation
Susan C. Walls, Caitlin R Gabor
2019, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (7)
The amphibian decline crisis has been challenging to address because of the complexity of factors—and their multitude of interactive effects—that drive this global issue. Dissecting such complexity could benefit from strategies that integrate multiple disciplines and address the mechanistic underpinnings of population declines and extirpations. We examine how the disciplines...
Seasonal precipitation influences streamflow vulnerability to the 2015 drought in the western United States
Christopher Konrad
2019, Journal of Hydrometeorology (20) 1261-1274
Streamflow was exceptionally low in the spring and summer of 2015 across much of the western United States because of a regional drought that exploited the sensitivity of both snow- and rain-dominant rivers. Streamflow during 2015 was examined at 324 gauges in the region to assess its response to the...
Recognizing the Famine Early Warning Systems Network: Over 30 years of drought early warning science advances and partnerships promoting global food security
Chris Funk, Shraddhanand Shukla, Wassila Mamadou Thiaw, James Rowland, Andrew Hoell, Gregory Husak, Nicholas Novella
2019, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 1011-1027
On a planet with more than 7 billion people, how do we identify the millions of drought-afflicted people who face a real threat of livelihood disruption or death without humanitarian assistance? Typically, these people are poor and heavily dependent on rainfed agriculture and livestock. Most live in Africa, Central America,...
Enhanced landslide mobility by basal liquefaction: the 2014 SR530 (Oso), Washington landslide
Brian D. Collins, Mark E. Reid
2019, Geological Society of America Bulletin (132) 451-476
Landslide mobility can vastly amplify the consequences of slope failure. As a compelling example, the March 22, 2014 landslide near Oso, Washington (USA) was particularly devastating, traveling across a 1-km+ wide river valley, killing 43 people, destroying dozens of homes, and temporarily closing a well-traveled highway. To resolve causes...
Variability in synthetic earthquake ground motions caused by source variability and errors in wave propagation models
Paul A. Spudich, Antonella Cirella, Laura Scognamiglio, Elisa Tinti
2019, Geophysical Journal International (219) 346-372
Numerical simulations of earthquake ground motions are used both to anticipate the effects of hypothetical earthquakes by forward simulation and to infer the behaviour of the real earthquake source ruptures by the inversion of recorded ground motions. In either application it is necessary to assume some Earth structure that...
ModelMuse Version 4: A graphical user interface for MODFLOW 6
Richard B. Winston
2019, Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5036
ModelMuse, a graphical user interface for groundwater-modeling software, was modified to support MODFLOW 6. ModelMuse works with two types of spatial discretization in MODFLOW 6: structured grids (DIS) and discretization by vertices (DISV). Quadtree refinement is used to generate a DISV model from a structured-grid model. The locations and weights...
The evolving threat of rapid Ohia death (ROD) to Hawaii’s native ecosystems and rare plant species
Lucas B. Fortini, Lauren R. Kaiser, Lisa Keith, Jonathan Price, R. Flint Hughes, James D. Jacobi, J. B. Friday
2019, Forest Ecology and Management (448) 376-385
Hawai‘i’s most widespread native tree, ‘ōhi‘a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), has been dying across large areas of Hawai‘i Island mainly due to two fungal pathogens (Ceratocystis lukuohia and Ceratocystis huliohia) that cause a disease collectively known as Rapid ‘Ōhi‘a Death (ROD). Here we examine patterns of positive detections of C. lukuohia as it has been...
Review: Endophytic microbes and their potential applications in crop management
James F. White, Kathryn L. Kingsley, Matthew T. Elmore, Satish Kumar Verma, Surendra K Gond, Kurt P. Kowalski
2019, Pest Management Science (75) 2558-2565
Endophytes are microbes (mostly bacteria and fungi) present in plants. Endophytic microbes are often functional in that they may carry nutrients from the soil into plants, modulate plant development, increase stress tolerance of plants, suppress virulence in pathogens, increase disease resistance in plants, and suppress development of competitor plant species....
Estimating density and detection of bobcats in fragmented Midwestern landscapes using spatial capture-recapture data from camera traps
Christopher N. Jacques, Robert W. Klaver, Tim C. Swearingen, Edward D. Davis, Charles R. Anderson, Jonathan A. Jenks, Christopher S. DePerno, Robert D. Bluett
2019, Wildlife Society Bulletin (43) 256-264
Camera-trapping data analyzed with spatially explicit capture–recapture (SCR) models can provide a rigorous method for estimating density of small populations of elusive carnivore species. We sought to develop and evaluate the efficacy of SCR models for estimating density of a presumed low-density bobcat (Lynx rufus) population in fragmented landscapes of...
Facilitating adaptation to climate change while restoring a montane plant community
Christina Leopold, Steve C. Hess
2019, PLoS ONE (14)
Montane plant communities throughout the world have responded to changes in temperature regimes by shifting ranges upward in elevation, and made downslope movements to track shifts in climatic water balance. Organisms that cannot disperse or adapt biologically to projected climate scenarios in situ may decrease in distributional range and abundance...
Digital mapping of ecological land units using a nationally scalable modeling framework
Jonathan J. Maynard, Travis W. Nauman, Shawn W. Salley, Brandon T. Bestelmeyer, Michael C. Duniway, Curtis J. Talbot, Joel R. Brown
2019, Article
Ecological site descriptions (ESDs) and associated state-and-transition models (STMs) provide a nationally consistent classification and information system for defining ecological land units for management applications in the United States. Current spatial representations of ESDs, however, occur via soil mapping and are therefore confined to the spatial resolution used to map...
LANDFIRE remap prototype mapping effort: Developing a new framework for mapping vegetation classification, change, and structure
Joshua J. Picotte, Daryn Dockter, Jordan Long, Brian L. Tolk, Anne Davidson, Birgit Peterson
2019, Fire (2) 1-26
LANDFIRE (LF) National (2001) was the original product suite of the LANDFIRE program, which included Existing Vegetation Cover (EVC), Height (EVH), and Type (EVT). Subsequent refinements after feedback from data users resulted in updated products, referred to as LF 2001, that now served as LANDFIRE’s baseline datasets and are the...
Simulation of water availability in the Southeastern United States for historical and potential future climate and land-cover conditions
Jacob H. LaFontaine, Rheannon M. Hart, Lauren E. Hay, William H. Farmer, Andy R. Bock, Roland J. Viger, Steven L. Markstrom, R. Steve Regan, Jessica M. Driscoll
2019, Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5039
A study was conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GCPO LCC) and the Department of the Interior Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, to evaluate the hydrologic response of a daily time step hydrologic model to historical observations...
Development of a flood-inundation map library and precipitation-runoff modeling for the Clear Fork Mohican River in and near Bellville, Ohio
Chad J. Ostheimer, Carrie A. Huitger
2019, Scientific Investigations Report 2019-5017
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District, led hydrologic and hydraulic analyses within the Clear Fork Mohican River Basin in and near Bellville, Ohio. The analyses included the development of digital flood-inundation maps for an approximately 2.5-mile reach of the Clear Fork Mohican River...
Modulation of seismic activity in Kīlauea’s Upper East Rift Zone by summit pressurization
Christelle Wauthier, Diana C. Roman, Michael P. Poland
2019, Geology
Kīlauea Volcano is underlain by a complex, laterally-extensive magmatic plumbing system. Although in recent decades it has mainly erupted through vents along the middle East Rift Zone and summit caldera, eruptions can occur anywhere along its two laterally extensive rift zones, as demonstrated by the dramatic eruptive activity of 2018....
Widespread initiation, reactivation, and acceleration of landslides in the northern California Coast Ranges due to extreme rainfall
Alexander L. Handwerger, Eric J. Fielding, Mong-Han Huang, Georgina L. Bennett, Cunren Liang, William H. Schulz
2019, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface (24) 1782-1797
Episodically to continuously active slow-moving landslides are driven by precipitation. Climate change, which is altering both the frequency and magnitude of precipitation world21 wide, is therefore predicted to have a major impact on landslides. Here we examine the behavior of hundreds of slow-moving landslides in northern California in response to large...
iCoast – Did the Coast Change?: Storm-impact model verification using citizen scientists
Karen L. M. Morgan, Nathaniel G. Plant, Hilary F. Stockdon, Richard J. Snell
2019, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference Coastal Sediments 2019
The USGS provides model predictions of severe storm impacts prior to landfall based on pre-storm morphology and predicted total water levels, including waves and surge. Presented in near real time on the USGS Coastal Change Hazard Portal, they provide coastal residents, scientists, and emergency managers valuable coastal response information. iCoast...
