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Forest ecosystems in eastern North America were in flux over the last several thousand years, well before Euro-American land clearance and the 20th-century onset of anthropogenic climate change. However, the magnitude and uncertainty of prehistoric vegetation change have been difficult to quantify because of the multiple ecological, dispersal, and sedimentary processes that govern the relationship...

Influenza A viruses are one of the most significant viral groups globally with substantial impacts on human, domestic animal and wildlife health. Wild birds are the natural reservoirs for these viruses, and active surveillance within wild bird populations provides critical information about viral evolution forming the basis of risk assessments...

Groundwater supplies 50% of drinking water worldwide, but compromised water quality from anthropogenic and geogenic contaminants can limit usage of groundwater as a drinking water source. Groundwater quality in the glacial aquifer system, USA (GLAC), is presented in the context of a hydrogeologic framework...

The connecting channels linking the Laurentian Great Lakes provide important migration routes, spawning grounds, and nursery habitat for fish, but their role as conduits between lakes for zooplankton is less understood. To address this knowledge gap in the St. Clair–Detroit River System (SCDRS), a comprehensive survey of crustacean zooplankton was...

This paper introduces a dataset containing consistent time-series measurements of anthropogenic activities potentially affecting stream quality across the conterminous United States and summarizes the most noteworthy trends from 61 variables in 16 categories. Data include measures of atmospheric deposition, agricultural production, livestock, urbanization, irrigation, land use, nutrients from fertilizer,...

The disjunct distribution of Cambarus monongalensis has led to speculation about its taxonomic status. An Appalachian Plateau population occurs in northern and central West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania, and a mountain population occurs in the Allegheny Mountains and Ridge and Valley physiographic provinces of the Virginias. Herein we describe the mountain population as Cambarus fetzneri sp....

In the taxonomic world, the oaks are known as a rambunctious group, notorious for hybridizing. In this report, we present preliminary information to address the question of how much hybridization is occurring between bur oak and white oaks with which it is sympatric, through rangewide sampling of bur oak and...

Hurricane Sandy provided a unique opportunity to better understand the movements of Fire Island’s dense white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus borealis) herds. White-tailed deer inhabit all areas of Fire Island National Seashore and their high densities negatively affect native vegetation in several areas of the island, especially as disturbed areas attempt...

Since 2011, tropical beaches from Africa to Brazil, Central America, and the Caribbean have been inundated by tons of sargassum seaweed from a new equatorial source of pelagic sargassum in the Atlantic. In recent years the extraordinary accumulations of sargassum make this a nuisance algal bloom for tropical coasts. In...

Delaying species management reduces the chance of successful recovery, increases the risk of extinction, and can be expensive. Acting before major declines are realized affords access to a greater suite of cost-effective management actions to sustain populations, reducing the likelihood of declines warranting protected status. It is clear that reactive...

In the last twenty years, multiple large and small hydroelectric dams have begun to transform the Amazonian region, spawning a growing volume of academic research across diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. In this article, we offer a critical review of recent research related to hydropower and sustainability with a focus...

This report documents a Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) model that was developed for an area covering the Blue Ridge, Piedmont, and Mesozoic basin fractured-rock aquifers in Fauquier County, Virginia, for the calendar years 1996–2015. The SWB model includes an area of 1,498 square miles, divided into 1,076-square-foot (100-square-meter) grid cells on which...

Oak trees host an amazing diversity of insects, many of which specialize on Quercus species. Oak species and genotypes are commonly planted far from where an acorn was produced. Urban plantings, restoration sites, and plantings anticipating climate change each cause this to happen. What evidence exists that provenance of oak...

Protected lands like national parks are important refuges for threatened and endangered species as environmental pressures on wildlife and their habitats increase. The Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), a species designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, occurs on public lands throughout the western United States including Mount...

Often, factors that determine the risk of an environmental hazard occur at landscape scales, and risk mitigation requires action by multiple private property owners. How property owners respond to risk mitigation on neighboring lands depends on whether mitigation actions are strategic complements or strategic substitutes. We test for these neighbor...

We investigated associations of fish assemblages and habitat characteristics (e.g., morphology and water chemistry) from 45 natural lakes and reservoirs in Iowa to determine whether species or trophic guild composition and environmental correlations were concordant between waterbodies of different origins. Overall, fish assemblage composition between natural...

The Lone Tree deposit is located in the northern Battle Mountain mining district, Nevada. Prior to mine closure in 2006, Santa Fe Pacific Gold and Newmont produced 4.2 Moz of gold at an average grade of 2.06 g/t at Lone Tree, primarily from the N-S– to NNW-SSE–striking Wayne zone. The...

Model estimated monthly water balance (WB) components (i.e., potential evapotranspiration, actual evapotranspiration, and runoff [R]) for 848 United States (U.S.) Geological Survey 8-digit hydrologic units located in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) are used to examine the temporal and spatial variability of the MRB WB for water years 1901 through...

Policies mandate that managers at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument must balance recreational opportunities with a variety of resource management and utilization activities across a vast and diverse landscape containing numerous Wilderness Study Areas and other lands containing spectacular resources. This balancing act is stressed by increasing levels of use and...

Small Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (sUAS) offer the capability to collect rapid and accurate aerial survey data during flood response. The rapid collection of aerial flood data can potentially enable scientists to produce detailed geospatial products and related datasets in time for decisional support. A workflow for sUAS event response before,...

Pheromones are important sexual signals in most animals, but research into their evolution is largely biased toward insects. Lampreys are a jawless fish with a relatively well-understood pheromone communication system and offer a useful opportunity to study pheromone evolution in a vertebrate. Once sexually mature, male sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus),...

Reliable tools are needed by farmers and managers to estimate and mitigate impacts of altered hydrology and degraded water quality downstream of agricultural areas. The Water, Energy, and Biogeochemical Model (WEBMOD) (Webb and Parkhurst 2017) was used to simulate daily variations of hydrology and water quality for 5 square kilometers...

Knowledge of the dietary components of fish species is important for understanding their growth, survival, and recruitment. Deficiency in thiamine (vitamin B1) leading to reproductive failure and physiological illness among freshwater fishes has been attributed to thiaminase activity in fish in the Great Lakes and the New York Finger Lakes,...

Single crystal (U‐Th)/He dating has been undertaken on 21 detrital zircon grains extracted from a core sample from Ocean Drilling Project (ODP) site 1073, which is located ~390 km northeast of the center of the Chesapeake Bay impact structure. Optical and electron imaging in combination with energy dispersive X‐ray microanalysis (EDS)...

This study estimates herbaceous and forested wetland coverage and aboveground biomass (AGB) within the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne coastal basins representing sediment rich and sediment poor coastal regions of southern Louisiana. Louisiana coastal wetlands account for approximately one third (37%) of the estuarine wetland area in the conterminous United States, yet...