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The U.S. Geological Survey completed a geology-based assessment of undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous petroleum resources in the Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin part of the Permian Basin Province of west Texas. This is the first U.S. Geological Survey evaluation of continuous resources in the Wolfcamp shale in the Midland...

The two nonnative invasive bigheaded carp species (bighead carp Hypophthalmichthys nobilis and silver carp H. molitrix) that were accidentally released in the 1970s have spread widely into the rivers and waterways of the Mississippi River Basin. First detected in the lower reaches of the Illinois Waterway (IWW, the combined Illinois...

The goals of the USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN, www.usanpn.org) are to advance science, inform decisions, and communicate and connect with the public regarding phenology and species’ responses to environmental variation and climate change. The USA-NPN seeks to facilitate informed ecosystem stewardship and management by providing phenological information...

A series of benchmark tests was run by comparing results of the Processing and Review Interface for Strong Motion data (PRISM) software version 1.0.0 to Basic Strong-Motion Accelerogram Processing Software (BAP; Converse and Brady, 1992), and to California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program (CSMIP) processing (Shakal and others, 2003, 2004)....

A continually increasing number of high-quality digital strong-motion records from stations of the National Strong-Motion Project (NSMP) of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as well as data from regional seismic networks within the United States, call for automated processing of strong-motion records with human review limited to selected significant...

The San Francisco estuary is commonly defined to include San Francisco Bay (bay) and the adjacent Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta (delta). The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has operated a high-frequency (15-minute sampling interval) water-quality monitoring network in San Francisco Bay since the late 1980s (Buchanan and others, 2014). This network...

IntroductionThe Floridan aquifer system (FAS) consists of the Upper Floridan aquifer (UFA), an intervening confining unit of highly variable properties, and the Lower Floridan aquifer (LFA). The UFA and LFA are primarily composed of Paleocene- to Oligocene-age carbonate rocks that include, locally, Upper Cretaceous rocks. The FAS extends from coastal...

A methodology for developing a representative set of storm scenarios based on historical wave buoy and tide gauge data for a region at the Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana, was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey. The total water level was calculated for a 10-year period and analyzed against existing topographic data...

Washover deposits on Fire Island, New York, from Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were investigated a year after the storm to document the sedimentary characteristics of hurricane washover features. Sediment data collected in the field includes stratigraphic descriptions and photos from trenches, bulk sediment samples, U-channels, and gouge and push cores....

The Rapid Land Cover Mapper is an Esri ArcGIS® Desktop add-in, which was created as an alternative to automated or semiautomated mapping methods. Based on a manual photo interpretation technique, the tool facilitates mapping over large areas and through time, and produces time-series raster maps and associated statistics that characterize...

In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assessed Lower Cretaceous Albian to Upper Cretaceous Cenomanian carbonate rocks of the Fredericksburg and Washita Groups and their equivalent units for technically recoverable, undiscovered hydrocarbon resources underlying onshore lands and State Waters of the Gulf Coast region of the United States. This assessment...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana and the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act, developed the Forested Floristic Quality Index (FFQI) for the Coastwide Reference Monitoring System (CRMS). The FFQI will help evaluate forested wetland sites on a continuum from...

The U.S. Geological Survey Branch of Quality Systems operates the Precipitation Chemistry Quality Assurance Project (PCQA) for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program/National Trends Network (NADP/NTN) and National Atmospheric Deposition Program/Mercury Deposition Network (NADP/MDN). Since 1978, various programs have been implemented by the PCQA to estimate data variability and bias contributed...

IntroductionThe U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Wetland and Aquatic Research Center (WARC) has two primary locations (Gainesville, Florida, and Lafayette, Louisiana) and field stations throughout the southeastern United States and Caribbean. WARC’s roots are in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and National Park Service research units that were brought into...

IntroductionThis U.S. Geological Survey report presents laboratory analyses along with field notes for an exploratory study to document the relative abundance of noble gases in mineral springs and water wells within the Cascadia forearc of Washington, Oregon, and California (fig. 1). This report describes 14 samples collected in 2014 and...

This report describes an R package called smwrGraphs, which consists of a collection of graphing functions for hydrologic data within R, a programming language and software environment for statistical computing. The functions in the package have been developed by the U.S. Geological Survey to create high-quality graphs for publication or...

The humpback chub (Gila cypha) is an endangered cyprinid species endemic to the Colorado River. The largest remaining population of the species spawns and rears in the Little Colorado River in Grand Canyon. Construction and operation of Glen Canyon Dam has altered the main-stem Colorado River in Glen and Grand...

Recent interest in flood control and restoration strategies in the Chehalis River Basin has increased the need to understand the current status and ecology of spring Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). Spring Chinook salmon have the longest exposure of all adult Chinook salmon life histories to the low-flow and high water...

The Albemarle Sound region was selected in 2012 as one of two demonstration sites in the Nation to test and improve the design of the National Water Quality Monitoring Council’s National Monitoring Network (NMN) for U.S. Coastal Waters and Tributaries. The goal of the NMN for U.S. Coastal Waters and...

Topock Marsh is a 1,637-hectare (4,045-acre) wetland adjacent to the Colorado River near Needles, California, and a main feature of Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in cooperation with the Bureau of Reclamation, began construction of an infrastructure improvement project in 2010 to increase the...

Petroleum production data are usually stored in a format that makes it easy to determine the year and month production started, if there are any breaks, and when production ends. However, in some cases, you may want to compare production runs where the start of production for all wells starts...

Water, bed sediment, and biota were sampled in selected streams from Butte to near Missoula, Montana, as part of a monitoring program in the upper Clark Fork Basin of western Montana. The sampling program was led by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to...

IntroductionThe Salton Sea (Sea) is an ecosystem facing large systemic changes in the near future. Managers and stakeholders are seeking solutions to the decline of the Sea and have turned to the scientific community for answers. In response, scientists gathered in Irvine, California, to review existing science and propose scientific...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is implementing a landscape approach to resource management (hereafter, landscape approach) to more effectively work with partners and understand the effects of management decisions. A landscape approach is a set of concepts and principles used to guide resource management when multiple stakeholders are involved...

Peatlands play an important role in boreal ecosystems, storing a large amount of soil organic carbon. In northern ecosystems, collapse-scar bogs (also known as thermokarst bogs) often form as the result of ground subsidence following permafrost thaw. To examine how ecosystem carbon balance changes with the loss of permafrost, we...