Modeling the influence of organic acids on soil weathering
Corey R. Lawrence, Jennifer W. Harden, Kate Maher
2014, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (139) 487-507
Biological inputs and organic matter cycling have long been regarded as important factors in the physical and chemical development of soils. In particular, the extent to which low molecular weight organic acids, such as oxalate, influence geochemical reactions has been widely studied. Although the effects of organic acids are diverse,...
The use of solvent extractions and solubility theory to discern hydrocarbon associations in coal, with application to the coal-supercritical CO2 system
Jonathan J. Kolak, Robert A. Burruss
2014, Organic Geochemistry (73) 56-69
Samples of three high volatile bituminous coals were subjected to parallel sets of extractions involving solvents dichloromethane (DCM), carbon disulfide (CS2), and supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) (40 °C, 100 bar) to study processes affecting coal–solvent interactions. Recoveries of perdeuterated surrogate compounds, n-hexadecane-d34 and four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), added as...
Modeling regeneration responses of big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) to abiotic conditions
Daniel R. Schlaepfer, William K. Lauenroth, John B. Bradford
2014, Ecological Modelling (286) 66-77
Ecosystems dominated by big sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata Nuttall (Asteraceae), which are the most widespread ecosystems in semiarid western North America, have been affected by land use practices and invasive species. Loss of big sagebrush and the decline of associated species, such as greater sage-grouse, are a concern to land managers...
Dissolved-solids sources, loads, yields, and concentrations in streams of the conterminous United States
David W. Anning, Marilyn E. Flynn
2014, Scientific Investigations Report 2014-5012
Recent studies have shown that excessive dissolved-solids concentrations in water can have adverse effects on the environment and on agricultural, domestic, municipal, and industrial water users. Such effects motivated the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Quality Assessment Program to develop a SPAtially-Referenced Regression on Watershed Attributes (SPARROW) model that has...
Arsenic, iron, lead, manganese, and uranium concentrations in private bedrock wells in southeastern New Hampshire, 2012-2013
Sarah M. Flanagan, Marcel Belaval, Joseph D. Ayotte
2014, Fact Sheet 2014-3042
Trace metals, such as arsenic, iron, lead, manganese, and uranium, in groundwater used for drinking have long been a concern because of the potential adverse effects on human health and the aesthetic or nuisance problems that some present. Moderate to high concentrations of the trace metal arsenic have been identified...
Focused campaign increases activity among participants in Nature's Notebook, a citizen science project
Theresa Crimmins, Jake F. Weltzin, Alyssa H. Rosemartin, Echo M. Surina, Lee Marsh, Ellen G. Denny
2014, Natural Sciences Education (43) 64-72
Citizen science projects, which engage non-professional scientists in one or more stages of scientific research, have been gaining popularity; yet maintaining participants’ activity level over time remains a challenge. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential for a short-term, focused campaign to increase participant activity in a...
Health status of Largescale Sucker (Catostomus macrocheilus) collected along an organic contaminant gradient in the lower Columbia River, Oregon and Washington, USA
Leticia Torres, Elena B. Nilsen, Robert A. Grove, Reynaldo Patino
2014, Science of the Total Environment (484) 353-364
The health of Largescale Sucker (Catostomus macrocheilus) in the lower Columbia River (USA) was evaluated using morphometric and histopathological approaches, and its association with organic contaminants accumulated in liver was evaluated in males. Fish were sampled from three sites along a contaminant gradient In 2009, body length and mass, condition...
Differentiating transpiration from evaporation in seasonal agricultural wetlands and the link to advective fluxes in the root zone
P.A.M. Bachand, S. Bachand, Jacob A. Fleck, Frank E. Anderson, Lisamarie Windham-Myers
2014, Science of the Total Environment (484) 232-248
The current state of science and engineering related to analyzing wetlands overlooks the importance of transpiration and risks data misinterpretation. In response, we developed hydrologic and mass budgets for agricultural wetlands using electrical conductivity (EC) as a natural conservative tracer. We developed simple differential equations that quantify evaporation and transpiration...
Determination of human-use pharmaceuticals in filtered water by direct aqueous injection: high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry
Edward T. Furlong, Mary C. Noriega, Christopher J. Kanagy, Leslie K. Kanagy, Laura J. Coffey, Mark R. Burkhardt
2014, Techniques and Methods 5-B10
This report describes a method for the determination of 110 human-use pharmaceuticals using a 100-microliter aliquot of a filtered water sample directly injected into a high-performance liquid chromatograph coupled to a triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer using an electrospray ionization source operated in the positive ion mode. The pharmaceuticals were separated...
Evidence against a Pleistocene desert refugium in the Lower Colorado River Basin
Camille A. Holmgren, Julio L. Betancourt, M. Cristina Penalba, Jose Delgadillo, Kristin Zuravnsky, Kimberly L. Hunter, Kate A. Rylander, Jeremy L. Weiss
2014, Journal of Biogeography (41) 1769-1780
Aim The absence of Sonoran Desert plants in late Pleistocene-aged packrat middens has led to speculation that they survived glacial episodes either in refugia as intact associations (Clementsian community concept) or in dry microsites within chaparral or woodland according to individualistic species responses (Gleasonian community concept). To test these...
Nesting ecology and nest survival of lesser prairie-chickens on the Southern High Plains of Texas
Blake A. Grisham, Philip K. Borsdorf, Clint W. Boal, Kathy K. Boydston
2014, Journal of Wildlife Management (78) 857-866
The decline in population and range of lesser prairie-chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) throughout the central and southern Great Plains has raised concerns considering their candidate status under the United States Endangered Species Act. Baseline ecological data for lesser prairie-chickens are limited, especially for the shinnery oak-grassland communities of Texas. This information...
Three-dimensional imaging, change detection, and stability assessment during the centerline trench levee seepage experiment using terrestrial light detection and ranging technology, Twitchell Island, California, 2012
Gerald W. Bawden, James Howle, Sandra Bond, Michelle Shriro, Peter Buck
2014, Open-File Report 2014-1092
A full scale field seepage test was conducted on a north-south trending levee segment of a now bypassed old meander belt on Twitchell Island, California, to understand the effects of live and decaying root systems on levee seepage and slope stability. The field test in May 2012 was centered on...
Validating a method for transferring social values of ecosystem services between public lands in the Rocky Mountain region
Benson C. Sherrouse, Darius J. Semmens
2014, Ecosystem Services (8) 166-177
With growing pressures on ecosystem services, social values attributed to them are increasingly important to land management decisions. Social values, defined here as perceived values the public ascribes to ecosystem services, particularly cultural services, are generally not accounted for through economic markets or considered alongside economic and ecological values in...
Strategies for preventing invasive plant outbreaks after prescribed fire in ponderosa pine forest
Amy J. Symstad, Wesley E. Newton, Daniel J. Swanson
2014, Forest Ecology and Management (324) 81-88
Land managers use prescribed fire to return a vital process to fire-adapted ecosystems, restore forest structure from a state altered by long-term fire suppression, and reduce wildfire intensity. However, fire often produces favorable conditions for invasive plant species, particularly if it is intense enough to reveal bare mineral soil and...
Flood inundation maps for the Wabash and Eel Rivers at Logansport, Indiana
Kathleen K. Fowler
2014, Scientific Investigations Map 3293
Digital flood-inundation maps for an 8.3-mile reach of the Wabash River and a 7.6-mile reach of the Eel River at Logansport, Indiana (Ind.), were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs. The inundation maps, which can be accessed through...
Multiseason occupancy models for correlated replicate surveys
James E. Hines, James D. Nichols, Jaime Collazo
2014, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (5) 583-591
Occupancy surveys collecting data from adjacent (sometimes correlated) spatial replicates have become relatively popular for logistical reasons. Hines et al. (2010) presented one approach to modelling such data for single-season occupancy surveys. Here, we present a multiseason analogue of this...
Hydrogeologic framework, groundwater movement, and water budget of the Kitsap Peninsula, west-central Washington
Wendy B. Welch, Lonna M. Frans, Theresa D. Olsen
2014, Scientific Investigations Report 2014-5106
This report presents information used to characterize the groundwater-flow system on the Kitsap Peninsula, and includes descriptions of the geology and hydrogeologic framework, groundwater recharge and discharge, groundwater levels and flow directions, seasonal groundwater-level fluctuations, interactions between aquifers and the surface‑water system, and a water budget. The Kitsap Peninsula is...
Compositional and stable carbon isotopic fractionation during non-autocatalytic thermochemical sulfate reduction by gaseous hydrocarbons
Xinyu Xia, Geoffrey S. Ellis, Qisheng Ma, Yongchun Tang
2014, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (139) 472-486
The possibility of autocatalysis during thermochemical sulfate reduction (TSR) by gaseous hydrocarbons was investigated by examination of previously reported laboratory and field data. This reaction was found to be a kinetically controlled non-autocatalytic process, and the apparent lack of autocatalysis is thought to be due to the absence of the...
National Land Imaging Requirements (NLIR) Pilot Project summary report: Summary of moderate resolution imaging user requirements
Carolyn Vadnais, Gregory L. Stensaas
2014, Open-File Report 2014-1107
Under the National Land Imaging Requirements (NLIR) Project, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is developing a functional capability to obtain, characterize, manage, maintain and prioritize all Earth observing (EO) land remote sensing user requirements. The goal is a better understanding of community needs that can be supported with land remote...
Reducing fatigue damage for ships in transit through structured decision making
J.M. Nichols, P.L. Fackler, K. Pacifici, K.D. Murphy, J.D. Nichols
2014, Marine Structures (38) 18-43
Research in structural monitoring has focused primarily on drawing inference about the health of a structure from the structure’s response to ambient or applied excitation. Knowledge of the current state can then be used to predict structural integrity at a future time and, in principle, allows one to take action...
Modeling Hawaiian ecosystem degradation due to invasive plants under current and future climates
Adam E. Vorsino, Lucas B. Fortini, Fred A. Amidon, Stephen E. Miller, James D. Jacobi, Jonathan P. Price, Sam `Ohukani`ohi`a Gon III, Gregory A. Koob
2014, PLoS ONE (9)
Occupation of native ecosystems by invasive plant species alters their structure and/or function. In Hawaii, a subset of introduced plants is regarded as extremely harmful due to competitive ability, ecosystem modification, and biogeochemical habitat degradation. By controlling this subset of highly invasive ecosystem modifiers, conservation managers could significantly reduce native...
H-binding of size- and polarity-fractionated soil and lignite humic acids after removal of metal and ash components
Marios Drosos, Jerry A. Leenheer, Apostolos Avgeropoulos, Yiannis Deligiannakis
2014, Environmental Science and Pollution Research (21) 3963-3971
A fractionation technique, combining dialysis removal of metal and ash components with hydrofluoric acid and pH 10 citrate buffer followed by chromatography of dialysis permeate on XAD-8 resin at decreasing pH values, has been applied to lignite humic acid (lignite-HA) and soil humic acid (soil-HA). H-binding data and non ideal...
Use of genetic data to infer population-specific ecological and phenotypic traits from mixed aggregations
Paul Moran, Jeffrey F. Bromaghin, Michele Masuda
2014, PLoS ONE (9)
Many applications in ecological genetics involve sampling individuals from a mixture of multiple biological populations and subsequently associating those individuals with the populations from which they arose. Analytical methods that assign individuals to their putative population of origin have utility in both basic and applied research, providing information about population-specific...
Hawaiian forest bird trends: using log-linear models to assess long-term trends is supported by model diagnostics and assumptions (reply to Freed and Cann 2013)
Richard J. Camp, Thane K. Pratt, P. Marcos Gorresen, Bethany L. Woodworth, John J. Jeffrey
2014, Condor (116) 97-101
Freed and Cann (2013) criticized our use of linear models to assess trends in the status of Hawaiian forest birds through time (Camp et al. 2009a, 2009b, 2010) by questioning our sampling scheme, whether we met model assumptions, and whether we ignored short-term changes in the population time series. In...
Using a Bayesian Network to predict shore-line change vulnerability to sea-level rise for the coasts of the United States
Benjamin T. Gutierrez, Nathaniel G. Plant, Elizabeth A. Pendleton, E. Robert Thieler
2014, Open-File Report 2014-1083
Sea-level rise is an ongoing phenomenon that is expected to continue and is projected to have a wide range of effects on coastal environments and infrastructure during the 21st century and beyond. Consequently, there is a need to assemble relevant datasets and to develop modeling or other analytical approaches to...
