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The height of the lava column is a fundamental measure of open-vent volcanic activity, but little continuous long-term data exist to understand this parameter. The recent (2008-2018) lava lake activity at the summit of Kīlauea Volcano provides a unique opportunity to track and understand the processes that control lava...

An episode of unrest began at Kīlauea in April 2018 that produced both significant volcanic output and high rates of seismicity, including a Mw 6.9 earthquake on 4 May 2018. In this study, we image the rupture process of this earthquake using a genetic algorithm-based back-projection technique. The dominant feature of the...

Soil contamination by lead (Pb) from past small munitions training on Beale Air Force Base, California, and Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, may result in adverse effects for passerine birds that utilize the locations. A study was conducted during 2016-17 by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the U.S....

U.S. Geological Survey science supports groundwater resource management in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain region. The USGS Science and Decisions Center is working with the Water Availability and Use Science Program to integrate economics into a sophisticated model of groundwater in the region. The model will quantify the status of the...

In the late 1800s, John Wesley Powell, second Director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), proposed gaging the flow of rivers and streams in the Western United States to evaluate the potential for irrigation. Around the same time, several cities in the Eastern United States established primitive streamgages to help...

Soils play a critical role in the cycling of water, energy, and carbon in the Earth system. Until recently, due primarily to a lack of soil property maps of a sufficiently high‐quality and spatial detail, a minor emphasis has been placed on providing high‐resolution measured soil parameter estimates for land...

The arrival of space-based imaging radar as a revolutionary land-surface mapping and monitoring tool little more than a quarter century ago enabled a spate of innovative volcano research worldwide. Soon after launch of European Space Agency’s ERS-1 spacecraft in 1991, the U.S. Geological Survey began SAR and InSAR studies of...

In large, alluvial floodplains dominated by agriculture, small streams have the potential to experience nutrient enrichment affecting algal assemblage structure and metabolism. Nutrient enrichment is largely driven by application of nutrients and altered hydrologic regimes. To inform stressor–response-based nutrient reduction goals for agricultural alluvial plain streams, diatom assemblages were sampled...

During late summer and fall, elk (Cervus canadensis) need access to adequate nutrition to support physiological requirements for reproduction and overwinter survival. The archery hunting season often occurs during this period and can affect distributions of elk as they seek areas that minimize perceived harvest risk. Areas that confer lower...

A simulation model of lake trout Salvelinus namaycush (Walbaum 1792) population dynamics in Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, was used to estimate (1) the optimal allocation of effort among gillnet mesh sizes that minimizes abundance in the shortest time; (2) the number of years needed to suppress the population to 90%...

Drought is common in rivers, yet how this disturbance regulates metabolic activity across network scales is largely unknown. Drought often lowers gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER) in small headwaters but by contrast can enhance GPP and cause algal blooms in downstream estuaries. We estimated ecosystem metabolism across...

Forests of the Rocky Mountains (USA and Canada) have experienced a large‐scale bark‐beetle (Dendoctronus ponderosae) epidemic that has led to widespread mortality of pine trees, followed by structural and compositional changes to the forest. The millions of dead trees resulting from this event likely have an effect on ecosystem processes,...

Suppression of invasive Lake Trout Salvelinus namaycush is an important management tool to use in native fish and ecosystem conservation throughout the U.S. Intermountain West. Lake Trout suppression, primarily by gill netting, has been ongoing in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, since 1995. Additional methods that cause...

Lava flows pose a significant hazard to infrastructure and property located close to volcanoes, and understanding how flows advance is necessary to manage volcanic hazard during eruptions. Compared to low-silica basaltic flows, flows of andesitic composition are infrequently erupted and so relatively few studies of their characteristics and behaviour exist. We...

Estimates of background noise of Global Positioning System‐derived time series of positions for 740 sites in the western United States are examined. These data consist of daily epochs of three components of displacements that are at least 9.75 years long within the interval between 2000 and 2018. We find that these time series...

A catastrophic flood event on the Missouri River system in 2011 led to substantial changes in abundance and distribution of unvegetated sand habitat. This river system is a major component of the breeding range for interior Least terns (Sternula antillarum; “terns”) and piping plovers (Charadrius melodus; “plovers”), both of which...

Wild-harvested plants face increasing demand globally. As in many fisheries, monitoring the effect of harvesting on the size and trajectory of resource stocks presents many challenges given often limited data from disparate sources. Here we analyze American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius L.) harvests from 18 states in the eastern U.S. 1978–2014 to infer temporal patterns...

In general, fish residing in rivers differ from fish residing in lakes in their mercury (Hg) isotope ratios. Specifically, fish residing in lakes typically show enriched values for the isotope ratios of δ202Hg (mass-dependent fractionation of isotope 202Hg) and Δ199Hg (mass-independent fractionation of isotope 199Hg) compared with fish residing in rivers, because...

The community structures and ecosystem functions of floodplains are primarily driven by variation in flood inundation. However, global changes, such as invasive species and nutrient enrichment, may alter the effects of flooding in these systems. We added nitrogen (N) to correspond with twice the annual atmospheric deposition rate of the...

Changes in land use have resulted in range shifts of many wildlife species, including those entering novel environments, resulting in the critical need to understand their spatial ecology to inform ecosystem effects and management decisions. Dispersing elk (Cervus elaphus) were colonizing areas of suitable habitat in the Northern Great Plains,...

Research on Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, has focused on the influence of two potential limiting factors for kokanee Oncorhynchus nerka (Walbaum, 1792): competition for food with Mysis diluviana (Loven, 1862, hereafter Mysis) and predation by lake trout Salvelinus namaycush (Walbaum, 1792). Population fluctuations of Mysis and lake trout have resulted in substantial heterogeneity in food...

Most land in the United States (US) is privately owned and used for agriculture. To address the effect of agriculture on wildlife, conservation professionals and organizations need to understand the land use decisions made by farmers and ranchers. We developed a tool for categorizing farmers and ranchers by their conservation...

The innermost ring in impact basins exposes material originating from various depths, and can be used to study the composition of the lunar crust with depth. In this study, we conduct quantitative mineralogical analyses of the innermost ring in 13 lunar impact basins using reflectance data from the Kaguya Multiband Imager and radiative transfer modeling. We...

Detecting trends in biological attributes is central to many stream monitoring programs; however, understanding how natural variability in environmental factors affects trend results is not well understood. We evaluated the influence of antecedent streamflow and sample timing (covariates) on trend estimates for fish, invertebrate, and diatom taxa richness and biological...

Two years ago, the King’s Centre for Visualization in Science (KCVS) at The King’s University, Edmonton released a new digital interactive version of the IUPAC Periodic Table of the Elements and Isotopes with accompanying educational resources at an International Conference on Chemistry Education. It can be found at www.isotopesmatter.com. The effort was...