A genetic signature of the evolution of loss of flight in the Galapagos cormorant
Alejandro Burga, Weiguang Wang, Eyal Ben-David, Paul C. Wolf, Andrew M. Ramey, Claudio Verdugo, Karen Lyons, Patricia G. Parker, Leonid Kruglyak
2017, Science (356)
INTRODUCTIONChanges in the size and proportion of limbs and other structures have played a key role in the evolution of species. One common class of limb modification is recurrent wing reduction and loss of flight in birds. Indeed, Darwin used the occurrence of flightless birds as an...
Nearly 400 million people are at higher risk of schistosomiasis because dams block the migration of snail-eating river prawns
Susanne H. Sokolow, Isabel J. Jones, Merlijn M. T. Jocque, Diana La, Olivia Cords, Anika Knight, Andrea Lund, Chelsea L. Wood, Kevin D. Lafferty, Christopher M. Hoover, Phillip A. Collender, Justin V. Remais, David Lopez-Carr, Jonathan J. Fisk, Armand M. Kuris, Giulio A. De Leo
2017, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (372)
Dams have long been associated with elevated burdens of human schistosomiasis, but how dams increase disease is not always clear, in part because dams have many ecological and socio-economic effects. A recent hypothesis argues that dams block reproduction of the migratory river prawns that eat the snail hosts of schistosomiasis....
Hydrologic characterization of Bushy Park Reservoir, South Carolina, 2013–15
Paul Conrads, Matthew D. Petkewich, W. Fred Falls, Timothy H. Lanier
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5050
The Bushy Park Reservoir is a relatively shallow impoundment in a semi-tropical climate and is the principal water supply for the 400,000 people of the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and the surrounding areas including the Bushy Park Industrial Complex. Although there is an adequate supply of freshwater in the...
A new seamless, high-resolution digital elevation model of the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary, California
Theresa A. Fregoso, Rueen-Fang Wang, Eli Ateljevich, Bruce E. Jaffe
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1067
Climate change, sea-level rise, and human development have contributed to the changing geomorphology of the San Francisco Bay - Delta (Bay-Delta) Estuary system. The need to predict scenarios of change led to the development of a new seamless, high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) of the Bay – Delta that can...
Application of molluscan analyses to the reconstruction of past environmental conditions in estuaries
G. Lynn Wingard, Donna Surge
2017, Book chapter, Applications of Paleoenvironmental Techniques in Estuarine Studies
Molluscs possess a number of attributes that make them an excellent source of past environmental conditions in estuaries: they are common in estuarine environments; they typically have hard shells and are usually well preserved in sediments; they are relatively easy to detect in the environment; they have limited mobility as...
Prehistoric floods on the Tennessee River—Assessing the use of stratigraphic records of past floods for improved flood-frequency analysis
Tessa M. Harden, Jim E. O'Connor
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5052
Stratigraphic analysis, coupled with geochronologic techniques, indicates that a rich history of large Tennessee River floods is preserved in the Tennessee River Gorge area. Deposits of flood sediment from the 1867 peak discharge of record (460,000 cubic feet per second at Chattanooga, Tennessee) are preserved at many locations throughout...
New distributional records of the stygobitic crayfish Cambarus cryptodytes (Decapoda: Cambaridae) in the Floridan Aquifer System of southwestern Georgia
Dante B. Fenolio, Matthew L. Niemiller, Andrew G. Gluesenkamp, Anna M. McKee, Steven J. Taylor
2017, Southeastern Naturalist (16) 163-181
Cambarus cryptodytes (Dougherty Plain Cave Crayfish) is an obligate inhabitant of groundwater habitats (i.e., a stygobiont) with troglomorphic adaptations in the Floridan aquifer system of southwestern Georgia and adjacent Florida panhandle, particularly in the Dougherty Plain and Marianna Lowlands. Documented occurrences of Dougherty Plain Cave Crayfish are spatially distributed as 2...
Five hydrologic and landscape databases for selected National Wildlife Refuges in the Southeastern United States
Gary R. Buell, Laura N. Gurley, Daniel L. Calhoun, Alexandria M. Hunt
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1018
This report serves as metadata and a user guide for five out of six hydrologic and landscape databases developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to describe data-collection, data-reduction, and data-analysis methods used to construct the databases and provides statistical and graphical...
Migration trends of Sockeye Salmon at the northern edge of their distribution
Michael P. Carey, Christian E. Zimmerman, Kevin D. Keith, Merlyn Schelske, Charles Lean, David C. Douglas
2017, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (146) 791-802
Climate change is affecting arctic and subarctic ecosystems, and anadromous fish such as Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. are particularly susceptible due to the physiological challenge of spawning migrations. Predicting how migratory timing will change under Arctic warming scenarios requires an understanding of how environmental factors drive salmon migrations. Multiple mechanisms...
Synoptic sampling and principal components analysis to identify sources of water and metals to an acid mine drainage stream
Patrick Byrne, Robert L. Runkel, Katherine Walton-Day
2017, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (24) 17220-17240
Combining the synoptic mass balance approach with principal components analysis (PCA) can be an effective method for discretising the chemistry of inflows and source areas in watersheds where contamination is diffuse in nature and/or complicated by groundwater interactions. This paper presents a field-scale study in which synoptic sampling and PCA...
Groundwater quality in the western San Joaquin Valley, California
Miranda S. Fram
2017, Fact Sheet 2017-3028
Groundwater provides more than 40 percent of California’s drinking water. To protect this vital resource, the State of California created the Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment (GAMA) Program. The Priority Basin Project of the GAMA Program provides a comprehensive assessment of the State’s groundwater quality and increases public access to...
Groundwater quality in the Western San Joaquin Valley study unit, 2010: California GAMA Priority Basin Project
Miranda S. Fram
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5032
Water quality in groundwater resources used for public drinking-water supply in the Western San Joaquin Valley (WSJV) was investigated by the USGS in cooperation with the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) as part of its Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment (GAMA) Program Priority Basin Project. The WSJV includes...
Performance measures for a Mississippi River reintroduction into the forested wetlands of Maurepas Swamp
Ken W. Krauss, Gary P. Shaffer, Richard F. Keim, Jim L. Chambers, William B. Wood, Stephen B. Hartley
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5036
The use of freshwater diversions (river reintroductions) from the Mississippi River as a restoration tool to rehabilitate Louisiana coastal wetlands has been promoted widely since the first such diversion at Caernarvon became operational in the early 1990s. To date, aside from the Bonnet Carré Spillway (which is designed and operated...
Marine ferromanganese encrustations: Archives of changing oceans
Andrea Koschinsky, James R. Hein
2017, Elements (13) 177-182
Marine iron–manganese oxide coatings occur in many shallow and deep-water areas of the global ocean and can form in three ways: 1) Fe–Mn crusts can precipitate from seawater onto rocks on seamounts; 2) Fe–Mn nodules can form on the sediment surface around a nucleus by diagenetic processes in sediment pore...
An updated geospatial liquefaction model for global application
Jing Zhu, Laurie G. Baise, Eric M. Thompson
2017, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (107) 1365-1385
We present an updated geospatial approach to estimation of earthquake-induced liquefaction from globally available geospatial proxies. Our previous iteration of the geospatial liquefaction model was based on mapped liquefaction surface effects from four earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Kobe, Japan, paired with geospatial explanatory variables including slope-derived VS30, compound...
Collecting a better water-quality sample: Reducing vertical stratification bias in open and closed channels
William R. Selbig
2017, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 5th Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conference and the 10th Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference
Collection of water-quality samples that accurately characterize average particle concentrations and distributions in channels can be complicated by large sources of variability. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed a fully automated Depth-Integrated Sample Arm (DISA) as a way to reduce bias and improve accuracy in water-quality concentration data. The DISA...
Hydrogeologic framework and hydrologic conditions of the Piney Point aquifer in Virginia
E. Randolph McFarland
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5041
The Piney Point aquifer in Virginia is newly described and delineated as being composed of six geologic units, in a study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ). The eastward-dipping geologic units include, in stratigraphically ascending order, thesand of the...
Climate change-induced vegetation shifts lead to more ecological droughts despite projected rainfall increases in many global temperate drylands
Britta Tietjen, Daniel R. Schlaepfer, John B. Bradford, William K. Laurenroth, Sonia A. Hall, Michael C. Duniway, Tamara Hochstrasser, Gensuo Jia, Seth M. Munson, David A. Pyke, Scott D. Wilson
2017, Global Change Biology (23) 2743-2754
Drylands occur world-wide and are particularly vulnerable to climate change since dryland ecosystems depend directly on soil water availability that may become increasingly limited as temperatures rise. Climate change will both directly impact soil water availability, and also change plant biomass, with resulting indirect feedbacks on soil moisture. Thus, the...
Perturbational and nonperturbational inversion of Rayleigh-wave velocities
Matthew M. Haney, Victor C. Tsai
2017, Geophysics (82) F15-F28
The inversion of Rayleigh-wave dispersion curves is a classic geophysical inverse problem. We have developed a set of MATLAB codes that performs forward modeling and inversion of Rayleigh-wave phase or group velocity measurements. We describe two different methods of inversion: a perturbational method based on finite elements and a nonperturbational...
Performance and application of a fluidized bed limestone reactor designed for control of alkalinity, hardness and pH at the Warm Springs Regional Fisheries Center
Barnaby J. Watten, Vincent A. Mudrak, Carlos Echevarria, Philip Sibrell, Steven T. Summerfelt, Claude E. Boyd
2017, Aquacultural Engineering (77) 97-106
Springs serving the Warm Springs Regional Fisheries Center, Warm Springs, Georgia, have pH, alkalinity, and hardness levels thatlie under the range required for successful fish propagation while free CO2 is well above allowable targets. We evaluate a pretreatment process that exploits limestone’s (CaCO3) ability to react away hydrogen ions (H+)...
Denitrifying woodchip bioreactor and phosphorus filter pairing to minimize pollution swapping
Laura E. Christianson, Christine Lepine, Philip Sibrell, Chad J. Penn, Steven T. Summerfelt
2017, Water Research (121) 129-139
Pairing denitrifying woodchip bioreactors and phosphorus-sorbing filters provides a unique, engineered approach for dual nutrient removal from waters impaired with both nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). This column study aimed to test placement of two P-filter media (acid mine drainage treatment residuals and steel slag) relative to a denitrifying system...
Duckling survival of mallards in Southland, New Zealand
Erin Garrick, Courtney L. Amundson, Phillip J. Seddon
2017, Journal of Wildlife Management (81) 858-867
The southern portion of New Zealand's South Island is a productive area for mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) despite a notable lack of permanent or semi-permanent wetlands. Most broods are reared in pastures that may or may not be flooded with ephemeral water. In recent years, there has been an increased conversion...
Flood of July 2016 in northern Wisconsin and the Bad River Reservation
Faith A. Fitzpatrick, Eric D. Dantoin, Naomi Tillison, Kara M. Watson, Robert J. Waschbusch, James D. Blount
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5029
Heavy rain fell across northern Wisconsin and the Bad River Reservation on July 11, 2016, as a result of several rounds of thunderstorms. The storms caused major flooding in the Bad River Basin and nearby tributaries along the south shore of Lake Superior. Rainfall totals were 8–10 inches or more...
Effects of changes in pumping on regional groundwater-flow paths, 2005 and 2010, and areas contributing recharge to discharging wells, 1990–2010, in the vicinity of North Penn Area 7 Superfund site, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
Lisa A. Senior, Daniel J. Goode
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5014
A previously developed regional groundwater flow model was used to simulate the effects of changes in pumping rates on groundwater-flow paths and extent of recharge discharging to wells for a contaminated fractured bedrock aquifer in southeastern Pennsylvania. Groundwater in the vicinity of the North Penn Area 7 Superfund site, Montgomery...
Comparison of benthos and plankton for Waukegan Harbor Area of Concern, Illinois, and Burns Harbor-Port of Indiana non-Area of Concern, Indiana, in 2015
Barbara C. Scudder Eikenberry, Hayley T. Olds, Daniel J. Burns, Edward G. Dobrowolski, Kurt L. Schmude
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5039
During two seasonal sampling events in spring (June) and fall (August) of 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey collected benthos (benthic invertebrates) and plankton (zooplankton and phytoplankton) at three sites each in the Waukegan Harbor Area of Concern (AOC) in Illinois and in Burns Harbor-Port of Indiana, a non-AOC comparison site...
