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Mangroves’ ability to store carbon (C) has long been recognized, but little is known about whether planted mangroves can store C as efficiently as naturally established (i.e., intact) stands and in which time frame. Through Bayesian logistic models compiled from 40 years of data and built from 684 planted mangrove...

The Coastal California Gnatcatcher (Polioptila californica californica), a federally threatened species, is a flagship species for regional conservation planning in southern California (USA). An inhabitant of coastal sage scrub vegetation, the gnatcatcher has declined in response to habitat loss and fragmentation, exacerbated by catastrophic wildfires. We...

The National Water Model (NWM) provides critical analyses and projections of streamflow that support water management decisions. However, the NWM performs poorly in lower-elevation rivers of the western United States (US). The accuracy of the NWM depends on the fidelity of the model inputs and the representation and calibration of...

Parturition timing has long been a topic of interest in ungulate research. However, few studies have examined parturition timing at fine scale (e.g., <1 day). Predator activity and environmental conditions can vary considerably with diel timing, which may result in selective pressure for parturition to occur...

Managers invest substantial resources to promote recovery of declining anadromous fish stocks. Recovery strategies are manifold and often include management actions intended to stimulate somatic growth, increase in-river survival, and motivate juvenile outmigration during favorable environmental conditions. Evaluating the efficacy of these management actions is difficult, however, because monitoring data...

The almond industry in California faces water management challenges that are being exacerbated by droughts, climate change, and groundwater sustainability legislation. The Tree-crop Remote sensing of Evapotranspiration eXperiment (T-REX) aims to explore opportunities to improve precision irrigation management for woody perennial cropping systems. Almond orchards in the California Central Valley...

The Southern California Borderland hosts a variety of geologic and oceanographic features that allow for diverse habitats to occur in a restricted region with a strong oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) and hard substrates. These include ferromanganese (FeMn) crusts and phosphorites targeted for deep-seabed mining...

Introduction: Habitat loss and degradation pose significant threats to global fish and wildlife populations, prompting substantial investments in habitat creation and restoration efforts. Not all habitats provide equal benefits, leading to challenges in prioritizing restoration actions. For example, juvenile anadromous salmonids require high quality rearing aquatic habitats to achieve the physiological...

ObjectiveOnce thought to be extirpated from the Chesapeake Bay, fall spawning runs of Atlantic Sturgeon Acipenser oxyrinchus have been rediscovered in the Marshyhope Creek (MC)–Nanticoke River (NR) system of Maryland, United States. High recapture rates in past telemetry surveys suggested a small population in the two connected tributaries. This...

Anadromous river herring populations, collectively alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis), have experienced a multi-century decline in abundance and distribution. These declines have been attributed in part to anthropogenic threats in freshwater ecosystems (e.g., habitat fragmentation, overharvest, water pollution, watershed development). An understanding of variability in juvenile productivity...

Ixodid (hard) ticks play important ecosystem roles and have significant impacts on animal and human health via tick-borne diseases and physiological stress from parasitism. Tick occurrence, abundance, activity, and key life-history traits are highly influenced by host availability, weather, microclimate, and landscape features. As such, changes in the environment can...

The Clean Water Act was passed by Congress in 1972 to regulate pollution within the waters of the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), the Kansas Water Office, the Nature Conservancy, the City of Lawrence, the City of...

Dust transported from rangelands of the Southwestern United States (US) to mountain snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin during spring (March-May) forces earlier and faster snowmelt, which creates problems for water resources and agriculture. To better understand the drivers of dust events, we investigated large-scale meteorology responsible for organizing...

The 17 January 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake was a watershed event, with far-reaching societal and scientific impacts. The earthquake, which occurred in the early days of both broadband seismic networks and the Internet, spurred advances in seismic monitoring, real-time systems, and development of data products. Motivated by the...

Traditionally, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) has focused on calculating ground motion hazard curves for elastic, 5%-damped pseudo spectral accelerations, Sa(T,5%), which are used as the basis for engineering design parameters and targets for ground motion selection and modification. However, structures and geotechnical systems can exhibit a wide range of...

The scarcity of historically recorded near-fault ground motions poses a challenge to systematically understanding the influence of near-fault effects on various types of seismic demands for engineering purposes. In particular, the current state of knowledge of the influence of ground-shaking intensity on soil liquefaction and its consequences does not specifically...

The 2024 Crustal Deformation Modeling Workshop was held June 10–14 at the Colorado School of Mines. The workshop included two days of tutorials on using PyLith for crustal deformation modeling, followed by three days of science talks and discussions. The workshop focused on four primary themes: ● Constraining long-term fault...

Permafrost holds more than twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere, but this large carbon reservoir is vulnerable to thaw and erosion under a rapidly changing Arctic climate. Convective storms are becoming increasingly common during Arctic summers and can amplify runoff and erosion. These extreme events, in concert...

As part of the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, all Bay States and the District of Columbia have committed to improving the condition of the Bay, which includes a goal to achieve sustainable fisheries. One outcome under that broad goal is improved effectiveness of fish habitat conservation and preservation efforts....

Wind erosion and dust emission from drylands have large consequences for ecosystem function and human health. Wind erosion is naturally reduced by soil crusting and sheltering by non-erodible roughness elements such as plants. Land uses that reduce surface roughness and disturb the soil surface can dramatically increase dust emission. Extraction...

Streamflow records from hydrologic models are attractive for use in operational hydrology, such as a streamflow frequency analysis. The amount of bias inherent to simulated streamflow from hydrologic models is often unknown, but it is likely present in derivative products. Therefore, a workflow may help determine where streamflow frequency analysis...

We developed Vp, Vs, Vp/Vs ratio, and Poisson’s ratio models of the uppermost crust (<4 km depth) from the eastern San Francisco (SF) Bay (California, USA) to near the Calaveras fault along a 15-km-long, linear profile. Upper crustal velocities are highly variable beneath, west, and well east of the Hayward fault. We...

Access to high-quality food is critical for long-distance migrants to provide energy for migration and arrival at breeding grounds in good condition. We studied effects of changing abundance and availability of a marine food, common eelgrass (Zostera marina L.), on an arctic-breeding, migratory goose, black brant (Brant bernicla nigricans Lawrence 1846), at...

Eruption source parameters (ESPs) are crucial for characterising volcanic eruptions and are essential inputs to numerical models used for hazard assessment. Key ESPs of explosive volcanic eruptions include plume height, mass eruption rate, eruption duration, and grain-size distribution. Some of these ESPs can be directly observed...

The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. We argue for a new conceptual model that...