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Organizations responsible for the management of water resources, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), are tasked with estimation of evaporation for water-budgeting and planning purposes. The USACE has historically used Class A pan evaporation data (pan data) to estimate evaporation from reservoirs but many USACE Districts have...

Domestic water-use and related socioeconomic and climatic data for 2005-10 were used in an analysis of 21 selected U.S. cities to describe recent domestic per capita water use, investigate variables that potentially affect domestic water use, and provide guidance for estimating domestic water use. Domestic water use may be affected...

White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) populations throughout western North America are in decline, likely as a result of overharvest, operation of dams, and agricultural and mineral extraction activities in their watersheds. Recruitment failure may reflect the loss of early-life stage fish in spawning areas of the upper Columbia River, which are...

Understanding the sources and processes that control groundwater compositions and the timing and magnitude of groundwater vulnerability to potential surface-water contamination under varying meteorologic conditions is critical to informing groundwater protection policies and practices. This is especially true in karst terrains, where infiltrating surface water can rapidly affect groundwater quality....

Despite decades of agricultural and urban use of fungicides and widespread detection of these pesticides in surface waters, relatively few data are available on the effects of fungicides on fish and invertebrates in the aquatic environment. Nine fungicides are reviewed in this report: azoxystrobin, boscalid, chlorothalonil, fludioxonil, myclobutanil, fenarimol, pyraclostrobin,...

We examined the relationships of clutch size (CS) and egg size to female body size (straight-line carapace length, CL) in a population of the turtle Mauremys leprosa from a polluted segment of oued (river) Tensift in arid west-central Morocco. Twenty-eight adult females were collected in May–July, 2009 and all were...

This study was initiated in cooperation with the St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD) to investigate groundwater and surface-water interaction in designated sentinel lakes in central Florida. Sentinel lakes are a SJRWMD established set of priority water bodies (lakes) for which minimum flows and levels (MFLs) are determined. Understanding...

Potential wetland extents were estimated for a 14-mile reach of the Wabash River near Terre Haute, Indiana. This pilot study was completed by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The study showed that potential wetland extents can be estimated...

Suspended-sediment transport is a critical element governing the geomorphology of tidal marshes. Marshes rely on both organic material and inorganic sediment deposition to maintain their elevation relative to sea level. In wetlands near the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Maryland, portions of the salt marsh have been subsiding relative to sea...

Two multiple-well monitoring sites were drilled in the Calaveras County portion of the Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Subbasin, about 100 miles east of San Francisco, California, during December 2009 and January 2010. Site 3N/9E-12G1-4 was drilled to a depth of 503 feet below land surface (bls), and four wells were...

Lago Garzas is located in west-central Puerto Rico, about 3.5 kilometers southwest of the town of Adjuntas, in the confluence of the Río Vacas and three other unnamed tributaries (fig. 1). The dam is owned and operated by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), and was constructed in 1943...

Bathymetric and velocimetric surveys were conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Kansas and Missouri Departments of Transportation, in the vicinity of 36 bridges at 27 highway crossings of the Missouri River between Brownville, Nebraska and St. Louis, Missouri, from July 13 through August 3, 2011, during...

Despite increasingly strict control of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) releases in France since the mid-1970s, PCB contamination of fish recently has emerged as a major concern in the lower Rhone River basin. We measured PCB concentrations in Rhone sediment to evaluate the effects of PCB releases from major urban and industrial...

Synoptic base-flow surveys were conducted on streams in the Verde Valley, central Arizona, in June 2007 and February 2011 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Verde River Basin Partnership, the Town of Clarkdale, and Yavapai County. These surveys, also known as seepage runs, measured streamflow under...

In June 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed two deep monitoring wells (MW01 and MW02) near Pavillion, Wyoming, to study groundwater quality. During April and May 2012, the U.S Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, collected groundwater-quality data and quality-control data from monitoring well...

The McTier Creek watershed is located in the headwaters of the Edisto River Basin, which is in the Coastal Plain region of South Carolina. The Edisto ecosystem has some of the highest recorded fish-tissue mercury concentrations in the United States. In an effort to advance the understanding of the fate...

In June 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed two deep monitoring wells (MW01 and MW02) near Pavillion, Wyoming to study groundwater quality. The U.S Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, designed a plan to collect groundwater data from these monitoring wells. This sampling and...

We report observations of water surface elevation, currents, and suspended sediment concentration (SSC) from a 10-m deep site on the inner shelf in northern Monterey Bay during the arrival of the 2010 Chile tsunami. Velocity profiles were measured from 3.5 m above the bed (mab) to the surface at 2...

Climate change will likely have profound effects on cold-water species of freshwater fishes. As temperatures rise, cold-water fish distributions may shift and contract in response. Predicting the effects of projected stream warming in stream networks is complicated by the generally poor correlation between water temperature and air temperature. Spatial dependencies...

Water-resource managers use daily mean streamflows to generate streamflow statistics and analyze streamflow conditions. An in-depth evaluation of flow regimes to promote instream ecological health often requires streamflow information obtainable only from a time series hydrograph. Historically, it has been difficult to estimate daily mean streamflow for an ungaged location....

A spatially extensive assessment of the environmental controls on mercury transport and bioaccumulation in stream ecosystems in New York and South Carolina was conducted as part of the U.S. Geological Survey National Water-Quality Assessment Program and included the determination of fluvial transport of mercury and associated constituents during water years...

The overarching goal of this research was to develop and demonstrate an automated Cropland Classification Algorithm (ACCA) that will rapidly, routinely, and accurately classify agricultural cropland extent, areas, and characteristics (e.g., irrigated vs. rainfed) over large areas such as a country or a region through combination of multi-sensor remote sensing and...

Longitudinal patterns in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) loads and chemical quality were identified in the Colorado River from the headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the United States-Mexico border from 1994 to 2011. Watershed- and reach-scale climate, land use, river discharge and hydrologic modification conditions that contribute to patterns in...

The Fort Collins Science Center (FORT) is a multi-disciplinary research and development center of the U.S. Geological Survey located in Fort Collins, Colorado. FORT research focuses on the needs of land- and water-management bureaus within the U.S. Department of the Interior, other Federal agencies, and State, Tribal, and non-government organizations....

Models of environmental systems have become increasingly complex, incorporating increasingly large numbers of parameters in an effort to represent physical processes on a scale approaching that at which they occur in nature. Consequently, the inverse problem of parameter estimation (specifically, model calibration) and subsequent uncertainty analysis have become increasingly computation-intensive...