The 3D Elevation Program: summary for Pennsylvania
William J. Carswell Jr.
2015, Fact Sheet 2015-3019
Elevation data are essential to a broad range of applications, including forest resources management, wildlife and habitat management, national security, recreation, and many others. For the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, elevation data are critical for natural resources conservation (including the effects of drilling for oil and natural gas), agriculture and precision...
The 3D Elevation Program: summary for Iowa
William J. Carswell Jr.
2015, Fact Sheet 2015-3018
Elevation data are essential to a broad range of applications, including forest resources management, wildlife and habitat management, national security, recreation, and many others. For the State of Iowa, elevation data are critical for agriculture and precision farming, infrastructure and construction management, natural resources conservation, flood risk management, water supply...
Low-flow characteristics and flow-duration statistics for selected USGS continuous-record streamgaging stations in North Carolina through 2012
J. Curtis Weaver
2015, Scientific Investigations Report 2015-5001
In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the North Carolina Division of Water Resources, compiled updated low-flow characteristics and flow-duration statistics for selected continuous-record streamgages in North Carolina. The compilation of updated streamflow statistics provides regulators and planners with relevant hydrologic information reflective of the recent droughts, which...
Wyoming greater sage-grouse habitat prioritization: A collection of multi-scale seasonal models and geographic information systems land management tools
Michael S. O’Donnell, Cameron L. Aldridge, Kevin E. Doherty, Bradley C. Fedy
2015, Data Series 891
With rapidly changing landscape conditions within Wyoming and the potential effects of landscape changes on sage-grouse habitat, land managers and conservation planners, among others, need procedures to assess the location and juxtaposition of important habitats, land-cover, and land-use patterns to balance wildlife requirements with multiple human land uses. Biologists frequently...
Water-quality trends for selected sites in the Boulder River and Tenmile Creek watersheds, Montana, based on data collected during water years 1997-2013
Steven K. Sando, Melanie L. Clark, Tom Cleasby, Elliott P. Barnhart
2015, Scientific Investigations Report 2015-5008
In the Boulder River and Tenmile Creek watersheds in southwestern Montana, there was intensive mining during a 40-year period after the discovery of gold in the early 1860s. Potential effects from the historic mining activities include acid-mine drainage and elevated concentrations of potentially toxic trace elements from mining remnants such...
Modelling non-Euclidean movement and landscape connectivity in highly structured ecological networks
Christopher Sutherland, Angela K. Fuller, J. Andrew Royle
2015, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (6) 169-177
Movement is influenced by landscape structure, configuration and geometry, but measuring distance as perceived by animals poses technical and logistical challenges. Instead, movement is typically measured using Euclidean distance, irrespective of location or landscape structure, or is based on arbitrary cost surfaces. A recently proposed extension of spatial...
Great (≥Mw8.0) megathrust earthquakes and the subduction of excess sediment and bathymetrically smooth seafloor
David W. Scholl, Stephe H. Kirby, Roland E. von Huene, Holly F. Ryan, Ray E. Wells, Eric L. Geist
2015, Geosphere (11) 236-265
Using older and in part flawed data, Ruff (1989) suggested that thick sediment entering the subduction zone (SZ) smooths and strengthens the trench-parallel distribution of interplate coupling. This circumstance was conjectured to favor rupture continuation and the generation of high-magnitude (≥Mw8.0) interplate thrust (IPT) earthquakes. Using larger and...
Quantifying avian predation on fish populations: integrating predator-specific deposition probabilities in tag-recovery studies
Nathan J. Hostetter, Allen F. Evans, Bradley M. Cramer, Ken Collis, Donald E. Lyons, Daniel D. Roby
2015, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (144) 410-422
Accurate assessment of specific mortality factors is vital to prioritize recovery actions for threatened and endangered species. For decades, tag recovery methods have been used to estimate fish mortality due to avian predation. Predation probabilities derived from fish tag recoveries on piscivorous waterbird colonies typically reflect minimum estimates of predation...
Geochemical maps of stream sediments in central Colorado, from New Mexico to Wyoming
Robert G. Eppinger, Stuart A. Giles, Terry L. Klein
2015, Open-File Report 2015-1025
The U.S. Geological Survey has completed a series of geologic, mineral resource, and environmental assessment studies in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado, from Leadville eastward to the range front and from New Mexico to the Wyoming border. Regional stream-sediment geochemical maps, useful for assessing mineral resources and environmental effects...
A multipurpose camera system for monitoring Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai'i
Matthew R. Patrick, Tim R. Orr, Lopaka Lee, Cyril J. Moniz
2015, Techniques and Methods 13-A2
We describe a low-cost, compact multipurpose camera system designed for field deployment at active volcanoes that can be used either as a webcam (transmitting images back to an observatory in real-time) or as a time-lapse camera system (storing images onto the camera system for periodic retrieval during field visits). The...
UCERF3: A new earthquake forecast for California's complex fault system
Edward H. Field, 2014 Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities
2015, Fact Sheet 2015-3009
With innovations, fresh data, and lessons learned from recent earthquakes, scientists have developed a new earthquake forecast model for California, a region under constant threat from potentially damaging events. The new model, referred to as the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, or "UCERF" (http://www.WGCEP.org/UCERF3), provides authoritative estimates of...
Multivariate analysis relating oil shale geochemical properties to NMR relaxometry
Justin E. Birdwell, Kathryn E. Washburn
2015, Energy & Fuels (29) 2234-2243
Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxometry has been used to provide insight into shale composition by separating relaxation responses from the various hydrogen-bearing phases present in shales in a noninvasive way. Previous low-field NMR work using solid-echo methods provided qualitative information on organic constituents associated with raw and pyrolyzed oil...
Invasive Species Science Branch: research and management tools for controlling invasive species
Robert N. Reed, Katie D. Walters
2015, Fact Sheet 2014-3076
Invasive, nonnative species of plants, animals, and disease organisms adversely affect the ecosystems they enter. Like “biological wildfires,” they can quickly spread and affect nearly all terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Invasive species have become one of the greatest environmental challenges of the 21st century in economic, environmental, and human health...
National Unmanned Aircraft Systems Project Office
Susan E. Goplen, Jeff L. Sloan
2015, Fact Sheet 2015-3013
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project Office leads the implementation of UAS technology in the Department of the Interior (DOI). Our mission is to support the transition of UAS into DOI as a new cost-effective tool for collecting remote-sensing data to monitor environmental conditions, respond...
Using near-real-time monitoring data from Pu'u 'Ō'ō vent at Kīlauea Volcano for training and educational purposes
Rachel Teasdale, Katrien van der Hoeven Kraft, Michael P. Poland
2015, Journal of Applied Volcanology (4)
Training non-scientists in the use of volcano-monitoring data is critical preparation in advance of a volcanic crisis, but it is currently unclear which methods are most effective for improving the content-knowledge of non-scientists to help bridge communications between volcano experts and non-experts. We measured knowledge gains for beginning-(introductory-level students) and...
Evaluating the status of individuals and populations: Advantages of multiple approaches and time scales
Daniel H. Monson, Lizabeth Bowen
2015, Book chapter, Sea Otter Conservation
The assessment of population status is a central goal of applied wildlife research and essential to the field of wildlife conservation. “Population status” has a number of definitions, the most widely used having to do with the current trajectory of the population (i.e., growing, stable, or declining), or the...
Heterogeneous movement of insectivorous Amazonian birds through primary and secondary forest: A case study using multistate models with radiotelemetry data
James E. Hines, Luke L. Powell, Jared D. Wolfe, Erik l. Johnson, James D. Nichols, Phillip C. Stouffer
2015, Biological Conservation (188) 100-108
Given rates of deforestation, disturbance, and secondary forest accumulation in tropical rainforests, there is a great need to quantify habitat use and movement among different habitats. This need is particularly pronounced for animals most sensitive to disturbance, such as insectivorous understory birds. Here we use multistate capture–recapture models with radiotelemetry...
Laboratory electrical resistivity analysis of geologic samples from Fort Irwin, California
Benjamin R. Bloss, Paul A. Bedrosian
David C. Buesch, editor(s)
2015, Open-File Report 2013-1024-E
Correlating laboratory resistivity measurements with geophysical resistivity models helps constrain these models to the geology and lithology of an area. Throughout the Fort Irwin National Training Center area, 111 samples from both cored boreholes and surface outcrops were collected and processed for laboratory measurements. These samples represent various lithologic types...
Oil detection in the coastal marshes of Louisiana using MESMA applied to band subsets of AVIRIS data
Seth H. Peterson, Dar A. Roberts, Michael Beland, Raymond F. Kokaly, Susan L. Ustin
2015, Remote Sensing of Environment (159) 222-231
We mapped oil presence in the marshes of Barataria Bay, Louisiana following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill using Airborne Visible InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data. Oil and non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) have very similar spectra, differing only in two narrow hydrocarbon absorption regions around 1700 and 2300 nm. Confusion between NPV and...
A new approach for continuous estimation of baseflow using discrete water quality data: Method description and comparison with baseflow estimates from two existing approaches
Matthew P. Miller, Henry M. Johnson, David D. Susong, David M. Wolock
2015, Journal of Hydrology (522) 203-210
Understanding how watershed characteristics and climate influence the baseflow component of stream discharge is a topic of interest to both the scientific and water management communities. Therefore, the development of baseflow estimation methods is a topic of active research. Previous studies have demonstrated that graphical hydrograph separation (GHS) and conductivity...
Geotechnical aspects in the epicentral region of the 2011, Mw5.8 Mineral, Virginia earthquake
Russell A. Green, Samuel Lasley, Mark W. Carter, Jeffrey W. Munsey, Brett W. Maurer, Martitia P. Tuttle
2015, GSA Special Papers (509) 151-172
A reconnaissance team documented the geotechnical and geological aspects in the epicentral region of the Mw (moment magnitude) 5.8 Mineral, Virginia (USA), earthquake of 23 August 2011. Tectonically and seismically induced ground deformations, evidence of liquefaction, rock slides, river bank slumps, ground subsidence, performance of earthen dams, damage to public infrastructure...
Simulation of groundwater flow and streamflow depletion in the Branch Brook, Merriland River, and parts of the Mousam River watersheds in southern Maine
Martha G. Nielsen, Daniel B. Locke
2015, Scientific Investigations Report 2014-5235
Watersheds of three streams, the Mousam River, Branch Brook, and Merriland River in southeastern Maine were investigated from 2010 through 2013 under a cooperative project between the U.S. Geological Survey and the Maine Geological Survey. The Branch Brook watershed previously had been deemed “at risk” by the Maine Geological Survey...
Empirical evaluation of the conceptual model underpinning a regional aquatic long-term monitoring program using causal modelling
Kathryn M. Irvine, Scott Miller, Robert K. Al-Chokhachy, Erik Archer, Brett B. Roper, Jeffrey L. Kershner
2015, Ecological Indicators (50) 8-23
Conceptual models are an integral facet of long-term monitoring programs. Proposed linkages between drivers, stressors, and ecological indicators are identified within the conceptual model of most mandated programs. We empirically evaluate a conceptual model developed for a regional aquatic and riparian monitoring program using causal models (i.e., Bayesian path analysis)....
Occupancy modeling for improved accuracy and understanding of pathogen prevalence and dynamics
Michael E. Colvin, James T. Peterson, Michael L. Kent, Carl B. Schreck
2015, PLoS ONE (10)
Most pathogen detection tests are imperfect, with a sensitivity < 100%, thereby resulting in the potential for a false negative, where a pathogen is present but not detected. False negatives in a sample inflate the number of non-detections, negatively biasing estimates of pathogen prevalence. Histological examination of tissues as a...
Resilience and risk: a demographic model to inform conservation planning for polar bears
Eric V. Regehr, Ryan H. Wilson, Karyn D. Rode, Michael C. Runge
2015, Open-File Report 2015-1029
Climate change is having widespread ecological effects, including loss of Arctic sea ice. This has led to listing of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and other ice-dependent marine mammals under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA). Methods are needed to evaluate the effects of climate change on population persistence to...
