Preparing for today's and tomorrow's water-resources challenges in eastern Long Island, New York
Ronald Busciolano, John P. Masterson, Robert F. Breault
2024, Fact Sheet 2024-3020
Freshwater is a vital natural resource. Although New York is a water-rich State, the wise and economical use of water resources is needed to ensure that there is enough water of adequate quality for both human and ecological needs—both for today and for tomorrow. Nowhere in New York is this...
Realizing the potential of eDNA biodiversity monitoring tools in the marine environment with application to offshore renewable energy
Adam Sepulveda, Cheryl Morrison, Maggie Hunter, Mona Khalil
2024, Fact Sheet 2024-3019
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) researches the biological diversity and distribution of species to support management, conservation, and resource use decisions. USGS scientists advance detection and monitoring technologies to assess changes in fish and wildlife populations, biodiversity, and the health of ecosystems. The United States is planning to install 30...
A genomic hotspot of diversifying selection and structural change in the hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus)
Robert S. Cornman
2024, PeerJ (12)
BackgroundPrevious work found that numerous genes positively selected within the hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) lineage are physically clustered in regions of conserved synteny. Here I further validate and expand on those finding utilizing an updated L. cinereus genome assembly and additional bat species as well as other tetrapod outgroups.MethodsA chromosome-level...
Towards entity-aware conditional variational inference for heterogeneous time-series prediction: An application to hydrology
Rahul Ghosh, Wallace (Andy) Mcaliley, Arvind Renganathan, Michael Steinbach, Christopher Duffy, Vipin Kumar
2024, Conference Paper, Proceedings of the 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM)
Many environmental systems (e.g., hydrology basins) can be modeled as entity whose response (e.g., streamflow) depends on drivers (e.g., weather) conditioned on their characteristics (e.g., soil properties). We introduce Entity-aware Conditional Variational Inference (EA-CVI), a novel probabilistic inverse modeling approach, to deduce entity characteristics from observed driver-response...
Simulated effects of projected 2014–40 withdrawals on groundwater flow and water levels in the New Jersey Coastal Plain
Leon J. Kauffman
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2024-5028
AbstractGroundwater flow between 2014 through 2040 was simulated in the New Jersey Coastal Plain based on three withdrawal scenarios. Two of the scenarios were based on projected population trends and the assumption of water conservation; the nominal water-loss scenario projected a status quo in the efficiency of water loss in...
Stratigraphy, paleoflora, and tectonic setting of the Paleogene Sheep Creek volcanic field, central Alaska
Timothy White, David Sunderlin, Dwight Bradley
2024, Professional Paper 1814-G
In this paper, we provide new information on the stratigraphy and paleoflora of the Sheep Creek volcanic field in the Alaska Range that bolsters our understanding of a key interval in the tectonic, paleoclimate, and paleoenvironmental history of the northern Cordillera. Although the distribution and basic stratigraphy of these rocks...
Deep vs shallow: GPS tags reveal a dichotomy in movement patterns of loggerhead turtles foraging in a coastal bay
Margaret Lamont, Daniel Slone, James P. Reid, Susan M. Butler, Joseph A. Alday
2024, Movement Ecology (12)
BackgroundIndividual variation in movement strategies of foraging loggerhead turtles have been documented on the scale of tens to hundreds of kilometers within single ocean basins. Use of different strategies among individuals may reflect variations in resources, predation pressure or competition. It is less common for individual turtles to...
Fire effects on geomorphic processes
Luke McGuire, Brian A. Ebel, Francis K. Rengers, Diana Vieira, Petter Nyman
2024, Nature Reviews Earth and Environment (5) 486-503
Fire-induced geomorphic changes, such as enhanced erosion and debris-flow activity, are expected to increase with climate change owing to increases in fire activity and rainfall intensification. In this Review, we summarize how landscape attributes, rainfall and burn severity influence post-fire geomorphic responses over a range of temporal and spatial scales....
Formation and evolution of the Pacific-North American (San Andreas) plate boundary: Constraints from the crustal architecture of northern California
Kevin P. Furlong, Antonio Villasenor, Harley M. Benz, Kirsty A. McKenzie
2024, Tectonics (43)
The northward migration of the Mendocino triple junction (MTJ) drives a fundamental plate boundary transformation from convergence to translation; producing a series of strike-slip faults, that become the San Andreas plate boundary. We find that the 3-D structure of the Pacific plate lithosphere in the vicinity of the MTJ controls...
Evaluating satellite-transmitter backpack-harness effects on greater sage-grouse survival and device retention in the Great Basin
Carl G. Lundblad, Christopher R. Anthony, Tyler Dungannon, Kimberly A. Haab, Elizabeth M. Schuyler, Chelsea E. Sink, Katie Dugger, Christian A. Hagen
2024, The Wildlife Society Bulletin (48)
Wildlife tracking studies have become ubiquitous in ecology and now provide previously unobtainable data regarding individual movement, vital rates, and population demographics. However, tracking devices can potentially reduce survival of study subjects, generating biases in the vital rates they seek to measure. Previous studies have found that greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus...
Assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources of the North Chukchi Basin, outer continental shelf of the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas, Arctic Ocean, 2023
David W. Houseknecht, Craig P. Markey, Tracey J. Mercier, Christopher J. Schenk, Christopher D. Connors, Jared T. Gooley, Palma J. Botterell, Rebecca A. Smith, William A. Rouse, Christopher P. Garrity
2024, Fact Sheet 2024-3015
Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated mean volumes of 1.8 billion barrels of oil and 119.9 trillion cubic feet of gas technically recoverable from undiscovered, conventional accumulations in Cretaceous and Cenozoic strata of the North Chukchi Basin....
Carbon isotope trends across a century of herbarium specimens suggest CO2 fertilization of C4 grasses.
Isa del Toro, Madelon Florence Case, Allison Karp, Jasper Slingsby, A. Carla Staver
2024, New Phytologist (243) 560-566
Increasing atmospheric CO2 is changing the dynamics of tropical savanna vegetation. C3 trees and grasses are known to experience CO2 fertilization, whereas responses to CO2 by C4 grasses are more ambiguous.Here, we sample stable carbon isotope trends in herbarium collections of South African C4 and C3 grasses to reconstruct 13C discrimination.We found that C3 grasses showed no trends...
Why snow is crucial for water supply — And what will happen when it becomes scarce
Karen R. Ryberg
2024, Nature (629) 1013-1014
Analysis of 70 years of snowfall in the Northern Hemisphere reveals that snow buffers the effect of varying precipitation levels on streamflow. The link highlights the need to rethink water-resource management as snow levels decline....
Two risk assessments: Evaluating the use of indicator HF183 Bacteroides versus pathogen measurements for modelling recreational illness risks in an urban watershed
K Skiendzielewski, Tucker R. Burch, Joel P. Stokdyk, Shannon McGinnis, S McLoughlin, Aaron Firnstahl, Sandy Spencer, Mark A. Borchardt, Heather Murphy
2024, Water Research (259)
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of HF183 Bacteroides for estimating pathogen exposures during recreational water activities. We compared the use of Bacteroides-based exposure assessment to exposure assessment that relied on pathogen measurements. We considered two types of recreational water sites: those impacted by combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and...
Temporally dense monitoring of pathogen occurrence at four drinking-water well sites – Insights and Implications
James F. Walsh, Randall J. Hunt, Anita C. Anderson, David W. Owens, Nancy Rice
2024, Water Research (259)
Yearlong, event based, microbiological and chemical sampling was conducted at four public water supply well sites spanning a range of geologic settings and well depths to look for correlation between precipitation events and microbial occurrence. Near-continuous monitoring using autosamplers occurred just before, during, and after...
A phylogeographical study of the discontinuously distributed Harlequin Duck (Histrionicus histrionicus)
Kim T Scribner, Sandra Talbot, Barbara J. Pierson, John D Robinson, Richard B. Lanctot, Daniel Esler, Kathryn Dickson
2024, Ibis
Species distributions are often indicative of historical biogeographical events and contemporary spatial biodiversity patterns. The Harlequin Duck Histrionicus histrionicus is a sea duck of conservation concern that has a disjunct distribution, with discrete portions of its range associated with northern Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins. Movement...
Thermal transfer rate is slower in bigger fish: How does body size affect response time of small, implantable temperature recording tags?
Matthew J. O'Donnell, Amy M. Regish, Stephen D. McCormick, Benjamin Letcher
2024, Ecology of Freshwater Fish
The recent miniaturisation of implantable temperature recording tags has made measuring the water temperatures fish experience in the wild possible, but there may be a body size-dependent delay in implanted tag response time to changes in external temperature. To determine whether fish body size affects the response rate of implanted...
Retrospective review of the pathology of American pikas
Adrienne Barrett, Kali Holder, Susan Knowles, Elise E. B. LaDouceur
2024, Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation
American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are small lagomorphs that live in mountainous talus areas of western North America. Studies on the histopathology of American pikas are limited. We summarize here the clinical histories, and gross and histologic findings of 12 American pikas, including 9 captive (wild-caught) and 3...
A comparison of eDNA sampling methods in an estuarine environment on presence of longfin smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) and fish community composition
Lizabeth Bowen, Shannon C. Waters, Lyndsay Lee Rankin, Karen M. Thorne, Daphne Gille, Susan De La Cruz, Isa Woo, Levi Lewis, Katie Karpenko, Cheryl Dean, Gregg Schumer
2024, Environmental DNA (6) e560
The loss of tidal wetlands in the San Francisco Bay estuary have led to declines in native fish presence. Restoration of tidal wetlands in this area has intensified, with a primary goal of increasing the number of native fishes. We compared the presence of longfin...
Causal inference approaches reveal both positive and negative unintended effects of agricultural and urban management practices on instream biological condition
Sean Cassian Emmons, Taylor E Woods, Matthew Joseph Cashman, Olivia Devereux, Gregory Noe, John A. Young, Scott Stranko, Jay V. Kilian, Katherine Hanna, Kelly O. Maloney
2024, Journal of Environmental Management (361)
Agricultural and urban management practices (MPs) are primarily designed and implemented to reduce nutrient and sediment concentrations in streams. However, there is growing interest in determining if MPs produce any unintended positive effects, or co-benefits, to instream biological and habitat...
Explosive 2018 eruptions at Kīlauea driven by a collapse-induced stomp-rocket mechanism
Joshua Allen Crozier, Josef Dufek, Leif Karlstrom, Kyle R. Anderson, Ryan Cain Cahalan, Weston Thelen, Mary Catherine Benage, Chao Liang
2024, Nature Geoscience (17) 572-578
Explosive volcanic eruptions produce hazardous atmospheric plumes composed of tephra particles, hot gas and entrained air. Such eruptions are generally driven by magmatic fragmentation or steam expansion. However, an eruption mechanism outside this phreatic–magmatic spectrum was suggested by a sequence of 12 explosive eruptions in May...
Prion seeding activity in plant tissues detected by RT-QuIC
Kate Burgener, Stuart Siegfried Lichtenberg, Daniel P. Walsh, Heather Inzalaco, Aaron Lomax, Joel Pedersen
2024, Pathogens (13)
Prion diseases such as scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and chronic wasting disease (CWD) affect domesticated and wild herbivorous mammals. Animals afflicted with CWD, the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of cervids (deer, elk, and moose), shed prions into the environment, where they may persist and remain infectious for years. These environmental...
Viral pathogen detection in U.S. game-farm mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) flags spillover risk to wild birds
Brian P. Bourke, Robert J. Dusek, Koray Ergunay, Yvonne-Marie Linton, Serguei Vyacheslavovich Drovetski
2024, Frontiers Earth Science Journal (11)
The threat posed by emerging infectious diseases is a major concern for global public health, animal health and food security, and the role of birds in transmission is increasingly under scrutiny. Each year, millions of mass-reared game-farm birds are released into the wild, presenting a unique and a poorly...
Behavioral trade-offs and multitasking by elk in relation to predation risk from Mexican gray wolves
Zachary J. Farley, Cara J. Thompson, Scott T. Boyle, Nicole M. Tatman, James W. Cain III
2024, Ecology and Evolution (14)
Predator non-consumptive effects (NCE) can alter prey foraging time and habitat use, potentially reducing fitness. Prey can mitigate NCEs by increasing vigilance, chewing-vigilance synchronization, and spatiotemporal avoidance of predators. We quantified the relationship between Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) predation risk and elk (Cervus...
Effects of drought and cloud-water interception on groundwater recharge and wildfire hazard for recent and future climate conditions, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Maui, and the Island of Hawaiʻi
Alan Mair, Delwyn S. Oki, Heidi L. Kāne, Adam G. Johnson, Kolja Rotzoll
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5141
The Water-budget Accounting for Tropical Regions Model (WATRMod) code was used for Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Maui, and the Island of Hawaiʻi to estimate the spatial distribution of groundwater recharge, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and climatic water deficit for a set of water-budget scenarios. The scenarios included historical and future drought conditions,...
