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Recent local-scale observations of glaciers, streams, and soil surfaces in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica (MDV) have documented evidence for rapid ice loss, glacial thinning, and ground surface subsidence associated with melting of ground ice. To evaluate the extent, magnitude, and location of decadal-scale landscape change in the MDV, we collected airborne lidar elevation data in...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with Federal, State, and local agencies, maintains a long-term network of hydrologic monitoring stations in Kansas. These data and associated analyses provide a unique overview of the hydrologic conditions and help improve the understanding of Kansas’ water resources. Yearly assessments of hydrologic conditions are...

Quantifying and understanding the natural streamflow regime, defined as expected streamflow that would occur in the absence of anthropogenic modification to the hydrologic system, is critically important for the development of management strategies aimed at protecting aquatic ecosystems. Water balance models have been applied frequently to estimate natural flows, but...

Most regional landslide warning systems utilize empirically derived rainfall thresholds that are difficult to improve without recalibration to additional landslide events. To address this limitation, we explored the use of synthetic rainfall to generate thousands of possible storm patterns and coupled them with a physics‐based hydrology and slope stability model...

Executive SummaryThe Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (Public Law 111—11) was passed into law on March 30, 2009. Subtitle F, also known as the SECURE Water Act, calls for the establishment of a “national water availability and use assessment program” within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS...

While many studies on tribal water resources of individual tribal lands in the United States (US) have been conducted, the importance of tribal water resources at a national scale has largely gone unrecognized because their combined totals have not been quantified. Thus, we sought to provide a numerical estimate of...

Fecal contamination from sewage and agricultural runoff is a pervasive problem in Great Lakes watersheds. Most work examining fecal pollution loads relies on discrete samples of fecal indicators and modeling land use. In this study, we made empirical measurements of human and ruminant-associated fecal indicator bacteria and combined these with...

The persistence of freshwater degradation has necessitated the growth of an expansive stream and wetland restoration industry, yet restoration prioritization at broad spatial extents is still limited and ad-hoc restoration prevails. The River Basin Restoration Prioritization tool has been developed to incorporate vetted, distributed data models into a catchment scale...

Single-well aquifer testing has been carried out at Pahute Mesa in southern Nevada since 1962. These tests include single-well pumping and slug tests to estimate geologic formation hydraulic properties. Initially, aquifer tests focused on identifying low-permeability rocks suitable for testing large-yield nuclear devices, whereas later hydrologic investigations focused on potential...

Groundwater systems are dynamic geologic environments in which water continuously flows from recharge areas to discharge areas at streams, springs, wetlands, coastal waters, and wells. Natural, predevelopment conditions within groundwater systems are changed by the introduction of wells and other human stresses that modify existing groundwater levels, flow paths, and...

Wildfire effects on soil‐physical and ‐hydraulic properties as a function of burn severity are poorly characterized, especially several years after wildfire. A stratified random sampling approach was used in 2015 to sample seven sites representing a spectrum of remotely sensed burn severity in the area impacted by the 2011 Las...

Unsaturated zone flow processes are an important focus of landslide hazard estimation. Differences in soil hydraulic behavior between wetting and drying conditions (i.e., hydraulic hysteresis) may be important in landslide triggering. Hydraulic hysteresis can complicate soil hydraulic parameter estimates and impact prediction capability. This investigation focused on hydraulic property estimation...

Changes in land-use practices and the extirpation (local extinction) of beaver populations in the early 20th century during European settlement are believed to have resulted in many changes in how streams in the Western United States function. Some of the negative changes that have resulted include stream channelization, soil erosion,...

Numerous contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) typically occur in urban rivers. Wastewater effluents are a major source of many CECs. Urban runoff (stormwater) is a major urban water budget component and may constitute another major CEC pathway. Yet, stormwater-based CEC field studies are rare. This research investigated 384 CECs in 36 stormwater samples in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, USA....

Dryland wind transport of sediment can accelerate soil erosion, degrade air quality, mobilize dunes, decrease water supply, and damage infrastructure. We measured aeolian sediment horizontal mass flux (q) at 100 cm height using passive aspirated sediment traps to better understand q variability on the Colorado Plateau. Measured q‘hot spots’ rival the highest ever...

An understanding of riverine water-quality dynamics in regional mixed-land use watersheds is the foundation for advances in landscape biogeochemistry and informed land management. A differential implementation of the statistical/process-based model SPAtially Referenced Regressions on Watershed attributes (SPARROW; Smith et al., https://doi.org/10.1029/97wr02171) is proposed to empirically relate a regional...

Sea-Bird Scientific’s HydroCycle-PO4 phosphate sensor is a single-analyte wet-chemistry sensor designed for in situ environmental monitoring. The unit was evaluated at the U.S. Geological Survey Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility to assess the accuracy of the sensor in solutions with known phosphorous concentration and to test the effects of chromophoric (colored) dissolved...

Extreme climate events—such as hurricanes, droughts, extreme precipitation, and wildfires—have the potential to alter watershed processes and stream response. Yet due to the destructive and hazardous nature and unpredictability of such events, capturing their hydrochemical signal is challenging. A 5‐year postwildfire study of stream chemistry in the Fourmile Creek watershed,...

While the influence of antecedent conditions on watershed function is widely recognized under typical hydrologic regimes, gaps remain in the context of extreme climate events (ECEs). ECEs are those events that far exceed seasonal norms of intensity, duration, or impact upon the physical environment or ecosystem. In this synthesis, we...

Integrated hydrologic modeling (IHM) encompasses a vast number of processes and specifications, variable in time and space, and development of models can be arduous. Model input construction techniques have not been formalized or made easily reproducible. Creating the input files for integrated hydrologic models requires complex GIS processing of raster and vector datasets from...

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) form a “living skin” at the soil surface in many low productivity ecosystems around the world including water- and cold-limited environments, and early successional seres (Belnap et al. 2003). They may be composed of any configuration of soil surface-dwelling cyanobacteria, eukaryotic algae, lichens, mosses or liverworts,...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) uses Maintenance of Variance Extension Type 1 (MOVE.1) regression to transfer streamflows measured at long-term continuous-record streamgaging stations to partial-record (PR) streamgaging stations where intermittent base-flow measurements are available. MOVE.1 regression is used widely throughout the hydrologic community to extend historic low flows and low-flow...

Green infrastructure refers to a range of urban stormwater management tools that can be flexibly implemented. These practices can aid in mitigating the negative impacts of runoff by increasing catchment detention capacity. We studied two engineered rain gardens (Cleveland OH) that were designed to infiltrate and detain direct runoff volume...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, has investigated the hydrology of the Great Dismal Swamp (Swamp) National Wildlife Refuge (Refuge) in Virginia and North Carolina and developed a three-dimensional numerical model to simulate groundwater and surface-water hydrology. The model was developed with...

Creative approaches to identifying umbrella species hold promise for devising effective surrogates of ecological communities or ecosystems. However, mechanistic niche models that predict range or habitat overlap among species may yet lack development. We reviewed literature on taxon-centered Bayesian belief network (BBN) models to explore a novel approach to identify...