Geologic framework, regional aquifer properties (1940s-2009), and spring, creek, and seep properties (2009-10) of the upper San Mateo Creek Basin near Mount Taylor, New Mexico
Jeff B. Langman, Jesse E. Sprague, Roger A. Durall
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5019
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service, examined the geologic framework, regional aquifer properties, and spring, creek, and seep properties of the upper San Mateo Creek Basin near Mount Taylor, which contains areas proposed for exploratory drilling and possible uranium mining on U.S. Forest Service land....
Sediment cores and chemistry for the Kootenai River White Sturgeon Habitat Restoration Project, Boundary County, Idaho
Gary J. Barton, Rhonda J. Weakland, Ryan L. Fosness, Stephen E. Cox, Marshall L. Williams
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2011-5006
The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, in cooperation with local, State, Federal, and Canadian agency co-managers and scientists, is assessing the feasibility of a Kootenai River habitat restoration project in Boundary County, Idaho. This project is oriented toward recovery of the endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) population, and simultaneously...
Evaluating release alternatives for a long-lived bird species under uncertainty about long-term demographic rates
Clinton T. Moore, Sarah J. Converse, Martin J. Folk, Michael C. Runge, Stephen A. Nesbitt
2012, Journal of Ornithology (152) 339-353
The release of animals to reestablish an extirpated population is a decision problem that is often attended by considerable uncertainty about the probability of success. Annual releases of captive-reared juvenile Whooping Cranes (Grus americana) were begun in 1993 in central Florida, USA, to establish a breeding, non-migratory population. Over a...
Combining lake and watershed characteristics with Landsat TM data for remote estimation of regional lake clarity
Ian M. McCullough, Cyndy Loftin, Steven A. Sader
2012, Remote Sensing of Environment (123) 109-115
Water clarity is a reliable indicator of lake productivity and an ideal metric of regional water quality. Clarity is an indicator of other water quality variables including chlorophyll-a, total phosphorus and trophic status; however, unlike these metrics, clarity can be accurately and efficiently estimated remotely on a regional scale. Remote...
Status and understanding of groundwater quality in the Tahoe-Martis, Central Sierra, and Southern Sierra study units, 2006-2007--California GAMA Priority Basin Project
Miranda S. Fram, Kenneth Belitz
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2011-5216
Groundwater quality in the Tahoe-Martis, Central Sierra, and Southern Sierra study units was investigated as part of the Priority Basin Project of the California Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment (GAMA) Program. The three study units are located in the Sierra Nevada region of California in parts of Nevada, Placer, El...
Evaluation of fault-normal/fault-parallel directions rotated ground motions for response history analysis of an instrumented six-story building
Erol Kalkan, Neal S. Kwong
2012, Open-File Report 2012-1058
According to regulatory building codes in United States (for example, 2010 California Building Code), at least two horizontal ground-motion components are required for three-dimensional (3D) response history analysis (RHA) of buildings. For sites within 5 km of an active fault, these records should be rotated to fault-normal/fault-parallel (FN/FP) directions, and...
Bayesian shared frailty models for regional inference about wildlife survival
D.M. Heisey
2012, Animal Conservation (15) 127-128
One can joke that 'exciting statistics' is an oxymoron, but it is neither a joke nor an exaggeration to say that these are exciting times to be involved in statistical ecology. As Halstead et al.'s (2012) paper nicely exemplifies, recently developed Bayesian analyses can now be used to extract insights...
Short-term response of Dicamptodon tenebrosus larvae to timber management in southwestern Oregon
Niels Leuthold, M. J. Adams, John P. Hayes
2012, Journal of Wildlife Management (76) 28-37
In the Pacific Northwest, previous studies have found a negative effect of timber management on the abundance of stream amphibians, but results have been variable and region specific. These studies have generally used survey methods that did not account for differences in capture probability and focused on stands that were...
Determination of streamflow of the Arkansas River near Bentley in south-central Kansas
Charles A. Perry
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5059
The Kansas Department of Agriculture, Division of Water Resources, requires that the streamflow of the Arkansas River just upstream from Bentley in south-central Kansas be measured or calculated before groundwater can be pumped from the well field. When the daily streamflow of the Arkansas River near Bentley is less than...
Advances in the simulation and automated measurement of well-sorted granular material: 1. Simulation
Daniel Buscombe, David M. Rubin
2012, Journal of Geophysical Research F: Earth Surface (117)
1. In this, the first of a pair of papers which address the simulation and automated measurement of well-sorted natural granular material, a method is presented for simulation of two-phase (solid, void) assemblages of discrete non-cohesive particles. The purpose is to have a flexible, yet computationally and theoretically simple, suite...
Advances in the simulation and automated measurement of well-sorted granular material: 2. Direct measures of particle properties
Daniel D. Buscombe, David M. Rubin
2012, Journal of Geophysical Research F: Earth Surface (117)
1. In this, the second of a pair of papers on the structure of well-sorted natural granular material (sediment), new methods are described for automated measurements from images of sediment, of: 1) particle-size standard deviation (arithmetic sorting) with and without apparent void fraction; and 2) mean particle size in material...
Assessing time-integrated dissolved concentrations and predicting toxicity of metals during diel cycling in streams
Laurie S. Balistrieri, David A. Nimick, Christopher A. Mebane
2012, Science of the Total Environment (425) 155-168
Evaluating water quality and the health of aquatic organisms is challenging in systems with systematic diel (24 hour) or less predictable runoff-induced changes in water composition. To advance our understanding of how to evaluate environmental health in these dynamic systems, field studies of diel cycling were conducted in two...
Dispersal of larval suckers at the Williamson River Delta, Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon, 2006-09
Tamara M. Wood, Heather A. Hendrixson, Douglas F. Markle, Charles S. Erdman, Summer M. Burdick, Craig M. Ellsworth, Norman L. Buccola
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5016
An advection/diffusion modeling approach was used to simulate the transport of larval suckers from spawning areas in the Williamson River, through the newly restored Williamson River Delta, to Upper Klamath Lake. The density simulations spanned the years of phased restoration, from 2006/2007 prior to any levee breaching, to 2008 when...
Spatially explicit land-use and land-cover scenarios for the Great Plains of the United States
Terry L. Sohl, Benjamin M. Sleeter, Kristi L. Sayler, Michelle A. Bouchard, Ryan R. Reker, Stacie L. Bennett, Rachel R. Sleeter, Ronald L. Kanengieter, Zhi-Liang Zhu
2012, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment (153) 1-15
The Great Plains of the United States has undergone extensive land-use and land-cover change in the past 150 years, with much of the once vast native grasslands and wetlands converted to agricultural crops, and much of the unbroken prairie now heavily grazed. Future land-use change in the region could have...
Linking urbanization to the Biological Condition Gradient (BCG) for stream ecosystems in the Northeastern United States using a Bayesian network approach
Roxolana Kashuba, Gerard McMahon, Thomas F. Cuffney, Song Qian, Kenneth Reckhow, Jeroen Gerritsen, Susan Davies
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5030
Urban development alters important physical, chemical, and biological processes that define urban stream ecosystems. An approach was developed for quantifying the effects of these processes on aquatic biota, and then linking those effects to endpoints that can be used for environmental management. These complex, interacting systems are challenging to model...
Modeling transport and deposition of the Mekong River sediment
Zuo Xue, Ruoying He, J. Paul Liu, John C. Warner
2012, Continental Shelf Research (37) 66-78
A Coupled Wave–Ocean–SedimentTransport Model was used to hindcast coastal circulation and fine sedimenttransport on the Mekong shelf in southeastern Asian in 2005. Comparisons with limited observations showed that the model simulation captured the regional patterns and temporal variability of surface wave, sea level, and suspended sediment concentration reasonably well. Significant...
Archive of single beam and swath bathymetry data collected nearshore of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, Mississippi, from West Ship Island, Mississippi, to Dauphin Island, Alabama: Methods and data report for USGS Cruises 08CCT01 and 08CCT02, July 2008, and 09CCT03 and 09CCT04, June 2009
Nancy T. DeWitt, James G. Flocks, Elizabeth A. Pendleton, Mark E. Hansen, B.J. Reynolds, Kyle W. Kelso, Dana S. Wiese, Charles R. Worley
2012, Data Series 675
During the summers of 2008 and 2009 the USGS conducted bathymetric surveys from West Ship Island, Miss., to Dauphin Island, Ala., as part of the Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOM) Ecosystem Change and Hazard Susceptibility project. The survey area extended from the shoreline out to approximately 2 kilometers and...
Simulation of streamflows and basin-wide hydrologic variables over several climate-change scenarios, Methow River basin, Washington
Frank D. Voss, Mark C. Mastin
2012, Scientific Investigations Report 2012-5031
The purpose of this project was to demonstrate the capabilities of an existing watershed model and downscaling procedures to provide simulated hydrological data over various greenhouse gas emission scenarios for use in the Methow River framework prototype. An existing watershed model was used to simulate daily time series of streamflow...
VARBOOT: A spatial bootstrap program for semivariogram uncertainty assessment
Eulogio Pardo-Iguzquiza, Ricardo A. Olea
2012, Computers & Geosciences (41) 188-198
In applied geostatistics, the semivariogram is commonly estimated from experimental data, producing an empirical semivariogram for a specified number of discrete lags. In a second stage, a model defined by a few parameters is fitted to the empirical semivariogram. As the experimental data are usually few and sparsely located, there...
Refining the model of barrier island formation along a paraglacial coast in the Gulf of Maine
Christopher J. Hein, Duncan M. FitzGerald, Emily A. Carruthers, Byron D. Stone, Walter A. Barnhardt, Allen M. Gontz
2012, Marine Geology (307-310) 40-57
Details of the internal architecture and local geochronology of Plum Island, the longest barrier in the Gulf of Maine, have refined our understanding of barrier island formation in paraglacial settings. Ground-penetrating radar and shallow-seismic profiles coupled with sediment cores and radiocarbon dates provide an 8000-year evolutionary history of this barrier...
Estimating survival rates with time series of standing age‐structure data
Mark S. Udevitz, Peter J. Gogan
2012, Ecology (93) 726-732
It has long been recognized that age‐structure data contain useful information for assessing the status and dynamics of wildlife populations. For example, age‐specific survival rates can be estimated with just a single sample from the age distribution of a stable, stationary population. For a population that is...
Identification of metapopulation dynamics among Northern Goshawks of the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska, and Coastal British Columbia
Sarah A. Sonsthagen, Erica L. McClaren, Frank I. Doyle, K. Titus, George K. Sage, Robert E. Wilson, Judy R. Gust, Sandra L. Talbot
2012, Conservation Genetics (13) 1045-1057
Northern Goshawks occupying the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska, and coastal British Columbia nest primarily in old-growth and mature forest, which results in spatial heterogeneity in the distribution of individuals across the landscape. We used microsatellite and mitochondrial data to infer genetic structure, gene flow, and fluctuations in population demography through evolutionary...
Quantity, structure, and habitat selection of natural spawning reefs by walleyes in a north temperate lake: A multiscale analysis
Joshua K. Raabe, Michael A. Bozek
2012, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (141) 1097-1108
Spawning habitat, the cornerstone of self-sustaining, naturally reproducing walleyeSander vitreus populations, has received limited quantitative research. Our goal was to quantitatively describe the structure and quantity of natural walleye spawning habitat and evaluate potential selection of habitat in Big Crooked Lake, Wisconsin. In 2004 and 2005, we located and delineated walleye...
Demographic population model for American shad: will access to additional habitat upstream of dams increase population sizes?
Julianne E. Harris, Joseph E. Hightower
2012, Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science (4) 262-283
American shad Alosa sapidissima are in decline in their native range, and modeling possible management scenarios could help guide their restoration. We developed a density-dependent, deterministic, stage-based matrix model to predict the population-level results of transporting American shad to suitable spawning habitat upstream of dams on the Roanoke River, North Carolina and...
Emerging prion disease drives host selection in a wildlife population
Stacie J. Robinson, Michael D. Samuel, Chad J. Johnson, Marie Adams, Debbie I. McKenzie
2012, Ecological Applications (22) 1050-1059
Infectious diseases are increasingly recognized as an important force driving population dynamics, conservation biology, and natural selection in wildlife populations. Infectious agents have been implicated in the decline of small or endangered populations and may act to constrain population size, distribution, growth rates, or migration patterns. Further, diseases may provide...