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Annual waterfowl harvest in North America is estimated through a collaborative and strategic process, with federal harvest surveys the primary method of estimation. Sea duck hunters participating in federal harvest surveys represent a small proportion of the overall waterfowl hunting population, limiting the utility of harvest estimates for sea ducks....

Fault-related folds and their associated secondary faults play a critical yet often underrecognized role in accommodating strain and generating earthquakes in active fold-and-thrust belts. In the Seattle fault zone (SFZ), Washington, USA, we present new paleoseismic, geomorphic, and geophysical evidence for late Pleistocene and Holocene earthquakes on...

Regulatory agencies in humid temperate environments rely on timely evaluations of streamflow depletion and drawdown to protect aquatic ecosystems and existing water users. Numerical models offer detailed insights, but their complexity and time demands often preclude their practical use in rapid decision-making. We present pycap-dss, an open-source Python package that...

Our understanding of the impacts of climate change, sea-level rise (SLR), and freshwater management on the magnitude and variability of carbon fluxes in tidal forested wetlands remains limited. In this study, we applied a process-driven wetland biogeochemistry model, Wetland Carbon Assessment Tool—DeNitrification-DeComposition (WCAT-DNDC) model to explore responses of carbon fluxes...

Geothermal systems are vulnerable to changes in water budget and composition, requiring science-based management. This study uses a dataset of spring water temperatures, time series of groundwater residence time tracers (tritium and carbon-14), and stable isotopes of water to understand geothermal flow in a low-temperature geothermal system in north west...

Modeling plays a vital role in understanding and managing complex environmental systems, but its credibility and quality depend heavily on a comprehensive set of defensible model activities and practices, especially when the system of interest is plagued with uncertainties and conflicting stakeholder perspectives. This paper proposes a...

Washington D.C. faces one of the highest 100-year flood risks of any major city along the U.S. East Coast. In addition to storm-surge inundation during hurricanes and nor'easters, water-level observations for Washington are strongly skewed by major floods on the Potomac River. Using geologic and historic records we find new...

In the United States, private wells are not federally regulated, and many households do not test for Arsenic (As). Chronic exposure is linked with multiple health outcomes, and risk can change sharply over short distances and with well depth. Coarse maps or sparse sampling often miss exceedances....

A long-held assumption in the management of exploited fisheries is that fish populations will compensate with increased recruit survival to replenish the population when adult stock size is reduced through harvest. Observations of depensatory recruitment (reduced recruit survival at low adult stock size) and critical depensatory thresholds have challenged the...

A shifting climate poses threats to alpine-adapted species including mountain goats. We used long-term (12 years) citizen science monitoring data and Bayesian N-mixture modeling to estimate population trends and drivers of population metrics among mountain goats in Glacier National Park (GNP). Median goats per site (n = 37 sites) declined by 45% (95%...

Visible-to-shortwave infrared (VSWIR) reflectance spectroscopy has revolutionized our understanding of planetary surface compositions. However, space-weathering processes on airless bodies complicate quantitative compositional analyses. Here, we present a framework to isolate the signatures of space weathering in VSWIR spectra of lunar maria by leveraging radiative transfer modeling under the assumptions that...

Remote sensing enables large-scale, image-based assessments of river dynamics, offering new opportunities for hydrological monitoring. We present a publicly available dataset consisting of 281,024 satellite and aerial images of U.S. rivers, constructed using an Application Programming Interface (API) and the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Hydrography Dataset. The dataset includes images,...

The bedrock geology of the 7.5-minute Eagle Lake quadrangle, Essex County, New York, consists of deformed and metamorphosed Mesoproterozoic gneisses of the Adirondack Highlands unconformably overlain by weakly deformed lower Paleozoic sedimentary rocks of the Champlain Valley. The Mesoproterozoic rocks occur on the eastern edge of the Adirondack Highlands and...

Executive Summary The purpose of this report is to provide the Marine Corps with a summary of abundance, breeding activity, demography, and habitat use of endangered Least Bell’s Vireos (Vireo bellii pusillus) at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California (MCBCP or Base). The report presents results of vireo surveys and monitoring...

In several early studies, central California marine terraces between Santa Barbara and Point Conception were interpreted to record sea-level high stands of the last interglacial complex, ∼80 ka to ∼120 ka (marine isotope stage [MIS] 5). These ages and their elevations (∼20 m to ∼45 m) indicate modest rates of tectonic...

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, ~56 Mya) interval was marked by massive 13C-depleted carbon emissions into the ocean/atmosphere system, manifested as a negative carbon isotope excursion (CIE) in sedimentary components, and ~5 °C global average warming. Episodes of hydrological perturbations and soil-erosion have been widely documented for the PETM but their...

To restore native biodiversity on island ecosystems containing invasive rodents, partial- and whole-island eradications generally rely on broadcast baiting with anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs). This approach can result in bait pellets entering aquatic environments, raising concerns about effects to non-target fish. Salmonids are a dominant group of fishes on many temperate...

The scale and magnitude of urban heating are often assessed using Satellite-Derived Land Surface Temperature (SD-LST). Yet, discrepancies in spatial resolution limit SD-LST’s ability to reflect pedestrian thermal experience, potentially leading to ineffective mitigation strategies. Hyper-local measurements of urban heat, defined as surface temperatures (TS) at the...

Paleoclimate researchers have been comparing Pliocene environmental data to paleoclimate model results since the 1980s. The Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project (PlioMIP) began in 2008 with a focus on the Late Pliocene. Here we assess the availability and utility of sea surface temperature (SST) data for verification of...

Coastal and pluvial flooding are both becoming more prevalent and severe due to climate change and urbanization in floodplains. The co-occurrence of these flood drivers is generally assumed to exacerbate the resulting flood impacts, a result referred to as compound flooding. However, few observational or modeling studies have investigated the...

Degradation of coral reefs over the past several decades has caused regional-scale erosion of the shallow seafloor that serves as a protective barrier against coastal hazards along southeast Florida, USA. How future change in coral reefs may affect coastal flooding, however, has been less attended than other factors contributing to...

Standardizing facies descriptions has proven key to integrating interpretations of depositional processes and environments from sedimentologic observations with geochemistry data for mudstone lithologies. Because of their fine-grained nature, high degree of compaction, and heterogeneous composition, standardizing methods for mudstone descriptions has proven difficult, but it is critical...

Accurate mapping of post-fire surviving trees is important for tracking forest recovery and prioritizing land management decisions. Satellite-based remote sensing is an effective method to assess post-fire forest conditions. Traditionally, differenced satellite-derived burn severity indices are computed by differencing one year pre- and post-fire spectral reflectance values. Differenced...

Critical water supply watersheds in the western United States (WUS) are impacted by wildfires, with potential negative effects on water quality and quantity. Scientific understanding is currently insufficient to deliver estimates of wildfire consequences for water quantity that are regionally accurate. Regional variability in the directionality and...

Computation of detailed groundwater flow budgets for subdivisions of Virginia’s Coastal Plain aquifer system has enabled quantification and more thorough understanding of groundwater flow within this important water resource. A zone budget analysis conducted on previously published groundwater models of the Virginia Coastal Plain and Virginia Eastern Shore shows that...