Continued geophysical logging near the GMH Electronics National Priorities List Superfund site near Roxboro, North Carolina
Dominick J. Antolino, Melinda J. Chapman
2017, Data Series 1022
The U.S. Geological Survey South Atlantic Water Science Center collected borehole geophysical logs and images and continuous water-level data near the GMH Electronics National Priorities List Superfund site near Roxboro, North Carolina, during December 2012 through July 2015. Previous work by the U.S. Geological Survey South Atlantic Water Science Center...
Predicting cyanobacterial abundance, microcystin, and geosmin in a eutrophic drinking-water reservoir using a 14-year dataset
Ted D. Harris, Jennifer L. Graham
2017, Lake and Reservoir Management
Cyanobacterial blooms degrade water quality in drinking water supply reservoirs by producing toxic and taste-and-odor causing secondary metabolites, which ultimately cause public health concerns and lead to increased treatment costs for water utilities. There have been numerous attempts to create models that predict cyanobacteria and their secondary metabolites, most using...
Estimating the settling velocity of bioclastic sediment using common grain-size analysis techniques
Michael V. W. Cuttler, Ryan J. Lowe, James L. Falter, Daniel D. Buscombe
2017, Sedimentology (64) 987-1004
Most techniques for estimating settling velocities of natural particles have been developed for siliciclastic sediments. Therefore, to understand how these techniques apply to bioclastic environments, measured settling velocities of bioclastic sedimentary deposits sampled from a nearshore fringing reef in Western Australia were compared with settling velocities calculated using results from...
Climatic controls on the global distribution, abundance, and species richness of mangrove forests
Michael J. Osland, Laura C. Feher, Kereen Griffith, Kyle C. Cavanaugh, Nicholas M. Enwright, Richard H. Day, Camille L. Stagg, Ken W. Krauss, Rebecca J. Howard, James B. Grace, Kerrylee Rogers
2017, Ecological Monographs (87) 341-359
Mangrove forests are highly productive tidal saline wetland ecosystems found along sheltered tropical and subtropical coasts. Ecologists have long assumed that climatic drivers (i.e., temperature and rainfall regimes) govern the global distribution, structure, and function of mangrove forests. However, data constraints have hindered the quantification of direct climate-mangrove linkages in...
Shallow water benthic imaging and substrate characterization using recreational-grade sidescan-sonar
Daniel D. Buscombe
2017, Environmental Modelling and Software 1-18
In recent years, lightweight, inexpensive, vessel-mounted ‘recreational grade’ sonar systems have rapidly grown in popularity among aquatic scientists, for swath imaging of benthic substrates. To promote an ongoing ‘democratization’ of acoustical imaging of shallow water environments, methods to carry out geometric and radiometric correction and georectification of sonar echograms are...
Spatial and temporal patterns of dissolved organic matter quantity and quality in the Mississippi River Basin, 1997–2013
Sarah M. Stackpoole, Edward G. Stets, David W. Clow, Douglas A. Burns, George R. Aiken, Brent T. Aulenbach, Irena F. Creed, Robert M. Hirsch, Hjalmar Laudon, Brian A. Pellerin, Robert G. Striegl
2017, Hydrological Processes (31) 902-915
Recent studies have found insignificant or decreasing trends in time-series dissolved organic carbon (DOC) datasets, questioning the assumption that long-term DOC concentrations in surface waters are increasing in response to anthropogenic forcing, including climate change, land use, and atmospheric acid deposition. We used the weighted regressions on time, discharge, and...
Engaging the user community for advancing societal applications of the Surface Water Ocean Topography mission
Faisal Hossain, Margaret Srinivasan, Craig Peterson, Alice Andral, Ed Beighley, Eric Anderson, Rashied Amini, Charon Birkett, David M. Bjerklie, Cheryl Ann Blain, Selma Cherchali, Cedric H. David, Bradley D. Doorn, Jorge Escurra, Lee-Lueng Fu, Chris Frans, John W. Fulton, Subhrendu Gangopadhyay, Subimal Ghosh, Colin Gleason, Marielle Gosset, Jessica Hausman, Gregg Jacobs, John Jones, Yasir Kaheil, Benoit Laignel, Patrick Le Moigne, Li Li, Fabien Lefevre, Mason Jr., Amita Mehta, Abhijit Mukherjee, Anthony Nguy-Robertson, Sophie Ricci, Adrien Paris, Tamlin Pavelsky, Nicolas Picot, Guy Schumann, Sudhir Shrestha, Pierre-Yves Le Traon, Eric Trehubenko
2017, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (November 2017) 285-290
Scheduled for launch in 2021, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will be a truly unique mission that will provide high-temporal-frequency maps of surface water extents and elevation variations of global water bodies (lakes/reservoirs, rivers, estuaries, oceans, and sea ice) at higher spatial resolution than is available with...
Unifying population and landscape ecology with spatial capture-recapture
J. Andrew Royle, Angela K. Fuller, Christopher Sutherland
2017, Ecography (41) 444-456
Spatial heterogeneity in the environment induces variation in population demographic rates and dispersal patterns, which result in spatio‐temporal variation in density and gene flow. Unfortunately, applying theory to learn about the role of spatial structure on populations has been hindered by the lack of mechanistic spatial models and inability to...
Geophysical expression of buried range-front embayment structure: Great Sand Dunes National Park, Rio Grande rift, Colorado
Benjamin J. Drenth, V. J. Grauch, Chester A. Ruleman, Judith A Schenk
2017, Geosphere (13) 974-990
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (GRSA, Colorado) lies along the eastern margin of the San Luis Basin and the tectonically active Sangre de Cristo fault system that are part of the northern Rio Grande rift. GRSA lies within a prominent embayment in the range front where two separate...
Responses of a 64-story unique San Francisco, CA. building to four earthquakes and ambient motions
Mehmet Celebi, J. Hooper, Ron Klemencic
2017, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering
We analyze the ambient and earthquake responses of a 64-story, instrumented, concrete core shear wall building in San Francisco, Calif. equipped with tuned sloshing liquid dampers (TSDs) and buckling restraining braces (BRBs). In an earlier paper [1], only ambient data were used to identify dynamic characteristics. Recently, the 72-channel instrumental...
Validation of NEXRAD data and models of bird migration stopover sites in the Northeast U.S.
Jeffrey J. Buler, James McLaren, Timothy Schreckengost, Jaclyn A. Smolinsky, Eric Walters, J. Andrew Arnold, Deanna K. Dawson
2017, Report
The national network of weather surveillance radars (NEXRAD) detects birds in flight, and has proven to be a useful remote-sensing tool for ornithological study. We used data collected during Fall 2008 to 2014 by 16 NEXRAD and four terminal Doppler weather radars (TDWR) in the northeastern U.S. to map and...
Impacts of mastication fuel treatments on California, USA, chaparral vegetation structure and composition
Teresa J. Brennan, Jon E. Keeley
2017, Fire Ecology (13) 120-138
Mechanical fuel treatments are a primary pre-fire strategy for potentially mitigating the threat of wildland fire, yet there is limited information on how they impact shrubland ecosystems. Our goal was to assess the impact of mechanical mastication fuel treatments on chaparral vegetation and to determine the extent to which they...
USGS revision of global iron ore production data—Clarification of the reporting of iron ore production in China and application of a uniform comparison methodology (2000-2015)
Candice C. Tuck, Sean Xun, Sheryl A. Singerling
2017, Mining Engineering (69) 20-23
Iron ore is the source of primary iron for the world’s iron and steel industries. Its production can be reported as crude ore, usable ore or iron content of ore. Historically, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) used reported crude ore production from China in tabulations of world iron ore production...
Accurate aging of juvenile salmonids using fork lengths
Suresh Sethi, Jonathon Gerken, Joshua Ashline
2017, Fisheries Research (185) 161-168
Juvenile salmon life history strategies, survival, and habitat interactions may vary by age cohort. However, aging individual juvenile fish using scale reading is time consuming and can be error prone. Fork length data are routinely measured while sampling juvenile salmonids. We explore the performance of aging juvenile fish based solely...
Influence of repeated prescribed fire on tree growth and mortality in Pinus resinosa forests, northern Minnesota
Alessandra Bottero, Anthony W. D’Amato, Brian J. Palik, Christel C. Kern, John B. Bradford, Sawyer S. Scherer
2017, Forest Science (63) 94-100
Prescribed fire is widely used for ecological restoration and fuel reduction in fire-dependent ecosystems, most of which are also prone to drought. Despite the importance of drought in fire-adapted forests, little is known about cumulative effects of repeated prescribed burning on tree growth and related response to drought. Using dendrochronological...
Fisheries research and monitoring activities of the Lake Erie Biological Station, 2016
Betsy L. Bodamer Scarbro, Richard T. Kraus, Patrick Kocovsky, Christopher Vandergoot
2017, Report
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"We conducted a biomass-based assessment of the Lake Erie Western Basin fish community using data collected from 2013-2016 Western Basin (spring and autumn) bottom trawl surveys. Biomass of total catch per hectare has decreased 75 percent since 2013. Declines were observed across all functional groups, but most notable was...
Summer habitat selection by Dall’s sheep in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska
Gretchen H. Roffler, Layne G. Adams, Mark Hebblewhite
2017, Journal of Mammalogy (98) 94-105
Sexual segregation occurs frequently in sexually dimorphic species, and it may be influenced by differential habitat requirements between sexes or by social or evolutionary mechanisms that maintain separation of sexes regardless of habitat selection. Understanding the degree of sex-specific habitat specialization is important for management of wildlife populations and the...
Geochemical evidence for a complex origin for the Kelso dunes, Mojave National Preserve, California USA
Daniel R. Muhs, Nicholas Lancaster, Gary L. Skipp
2017, Geomorphology (276) 222-243
The Kelso Dune field in southern California is intriguing because although it is of limited areal extent (~ 100 km2), it has a wide variety of dune forms and contains many active dunes (~ 40 km2), which is unusual in the Mojave Desert. Studies over the past eight decades have concluded that the dunes...
Detecting spatial regimes in ecosystems
Shana M. Sundstrom, Tarsha Eason, R. John Nelson, David G. Angeler, Chris Barichievy, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Nicholas A.J. Graham, Dean Granholm, Lance Gunderson, Melinda Knutson, Kirsty L. Nash, Trisha Spanbauer, Craig A. Stow, Craig R. Allen
2017, Ecology Letters (20) 19-32
Research on early warning indicators has generally focused on assessing temporal transitions with limited application of these methods to detecting spatial regimes. Traditional spatial boundary detection procedures that result in ecoregion maps are typically based on ecological potential (i.e. potential vegetation), and often fail to account for ongoing changes due...
A hidden-process model for estimating prespawn mortality using carcass survey data
J. Tyrell DeWeber, James T. Peterson, Cameron Sharpe, Michael L. Kent, Michael E. Colvin, Carl B. Schreck
2017, North American Journal of Fisheries Management (37) 162-175
After returning to spawning areas, adult Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. often die without spawning successfully, which is commonly referred to as prespawn mortality. Prespawn mortality reduces reproductive success and can thereby hamper conservation, restoration, and reintroduction efforts. The primary source of information used to estimate prespawn mortality is collected through carcass surveys,...
Beaver colony density trends on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, 1987 – 2013
Christine Ribic, Deahn M. Donner, Albert J. Beck, David J. Rugg, Sue Reinecke, Dan Eklund
2017, PLoS ONE (12) 1-15
The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) is a managed species in the United States. In northern Wisconsin, as part of the state-wide beaver management program, the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest removes beavers from targeted trout streams on U.S. Forest Service lands. However, the success of this management program has not been...
Relative contributions of copper oxide nanoparticles and dissolved copper to Cu uptake kinetics of Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) embryos
Chuanjia Jiang, Benjamin T. Castellon, Cole W. Matson, George R. Aiken, Heileen Hsu-Kim
2017, Environmental Science & Technology (51) 1395-1404
The toxicity of soluble metal-based nanomaterials may be due to the uptake of metals in both dissolved and nanoparticulate forms, but the relative contributions of these different forms to overall metal uptake rates under environmental conditions are not quantitatively defined. Here, we investigated the linkage between...
Effects of topographic data quality on estimates of shallow slope stability using different regolith depth models
Rex L. Baum
2017, Conference Paper, Landslides: Putting Experience, Knowledge and Emerging Technologies into Practice--Proceedings of the 3rd North American Symposium on Landslides: Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists Special Publication 27
Thickness of colluvium or regolith overlying bedrock or other consolidated materials is a major factor in determining stability of unconsolidated earth materials on steep slopes. Many efforts to model spatially distributed slope stability, for example to assess susceptibility to shallow landslides, have relied on estimates of constant thickness, constant depth,...
Impacts of mesquite distribution on seasonal space use of lesser prairie-chickens
Matthew A. Boggie, Cody R. Strong, Daniel Lusk, Scott A. Carleton, William R. Gould, Randy L. Howard, Clay T. Nichols, Michael J. Falkowski, Christian A. Hagen
2017, Rangeland Ecology and Management (70) 68-77
Loss of native grasslands by anthropogenic disturbances has reduced availability and connectivity of habitat for many grassland species. A primary threat to contiguous grasslands is the encroachment of woody vegetation, which is spurred by disturbances that take on many forms from energy development, fire suppression, and grazing. These disturbances are...
Thumbnail‐based questionnaires for the rapid and efficient collection of macroseismic data from global earthquakes
Remy Bossu, Matthieu Landes, Frederic Roussel, Robert Steed, Gilles Mazet-Roux, Stacey S. Martin, Susan E. Hough
2017, Seismological Research Letters (88) 72-81
The collection of earthquake testimonies (i.e., qualitative descriptions of felt shaking) is essential for macroseismic studies (i.e., studies gathering information on how strongly an earthquake was felt in different places), and when done rapidly and systematically, improves situational awareness and in turn can contribute to efficient emergency response. In this...
