Satellite interferometry landslide detection and preliminary tsunamigenic plausibility assessment in Prince William Sound, southcentral Alaska
Lauren N. Schaefer, Jinwook Kim, Dennis M. Staley, Zhong Lu, Katherine R. Barnhart
2024, Open-File Report 2023-1099
Regional mapping of actively deforming landslides, including measurements of landslide velocity, is integral for hazard assessments in paraglacial environments. These inventories are also critical for describing the potential impacts that the warming effects of climate change have on slope instability in mountainous and cryospheric terrain. The objective of this study...
Using resiliency, redundancy, and representation in a Bayesian belief network to assess imperilment of riverine fishes
Corey Garland Dunn, David A. Schumann, Michael E. Colvin, Logan John Sleezer, Matthew Wagner, D. Todd Jones-Farrand, Erin Rivenbark, Sarah McRae, Kristine Evans
2024, Ecosphere (15)
Conservation prioritization frameworks are used worldwide to identify species at greatest risk of extinction and to allocate limited resources across regions, species, and populations. Conservation prioritization can be impeded by ecological knowledge gaps and data deficiency, especially in freshwater species inhabiting highly complex aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, we developed a flexible...
Macroscale controls determine the recovery of river ecosystem productivity following flood disturbances
Heili Lowman, Robert K. Shriver, Robert O. Hall Jr., Judson Harvey, Philip Savoy, Charles B. Yackulic, Joanna R. Blaszczak
2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (121)
River ecosystems rely on varied flows, including regular floods, to provide food and habitat for aquatic organisms. However, flows of freshwater are becoming increasingly managed for irrigation, industry, and other human activities, and the frequency of floods is changing. Our study used time-series data of photosynthesis from 143 rivers across...
Remote sensing-based 3D assessment of landslides: A review of the data, methods, and applications
Hessah Albanwan, Rongjun Qin, Jung-Kuan Liu
2024, Remote Sensing (16)
Remote sensing (RS) techniques are essential for studying hazardous landslide events because they capture information and monitor sites at scale. They enable analyzing causes and impacts of ongoing events for disaster management. There has been a plethora of work in the literature mostly discussing (1) applications to detect, monitor,...
Examining the effect of physicochemical and meteorological variables on water quality indicators of harmful algal blooms in a shallow hypereutrophic lake using machine learning techniques
Susan Wherry, Liam N. Schenk
2024, Water (4) 1073-1082
Two independent machine learning techniques, boosted regression trees and artificial neural networks, were used to examine the physicochemical and meteorological variables that affect the seasonal growth and decline of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in a shallow, hypereutrophic lake in southern Oregon. High temporal resolution data collected...
Identifying indicators of polar bear population status
Karyn D. Rode, Ryan R. Wilson, Justin A. Crawford, Lori T. Quakenbush
2024, Ecological Indicators (159)
Monitoring trends in large mammal populations is a fundamental component of wildlife management and conservation. However, direct estimates of population size and vital rates of large mammals can be logistically challenging and expensive. Indicators that reflect trends in abundance, therefore, can be valuable tools for...
Evaluating density-weighted connectivity of black bears (Ursus americanus) in Glacier National Park with spatial capture–recapture models
Sarah L Carroll, Greta M Schmidt, John S. Waller, Tabitha A. Graves
2024, Movement Ecology (12)
BackgroundImproved understanding of wildlife population connectivity among protected area networks can support effective planning for the persistence of wildlife populations in the face of land use and climate change. Common approaches to estimating connectivity often rely on small samples of individuals without considering the spatial structure of populations,...
Report of the River Master of the Delaware River for the period December 1, 2013–November 30, 2014
Kendra L. Russell, William J. Andrews, Vincent J. DiFrenna, J. Michael Norris, Mason Jr.
2024, Open-File Report 2023-1084
Executive SummaryA Decree of the Supreme Court of the United States, entered June 7, 1954 (New Jersey v. New York, 347 U.S. 995), established the position of Delaware River Master within the U.S. Geological Survey. In addition, the Decree authorizes the diversion of water from the Delaware River Basin and...
A far-traveled basalt lava flow in north-central Oregon, USA
Anthony Francis Pivarunas, David R. Sherrod, Jim E. O'Connor, Charles M. Cannon, Mark E. Stelten
2024, Geological Society of America Bulletin (136) 3291-3310
Widely separated basalt lava-flow outcrops in north-central Oregon, USA, expose products of a single eruptive episode. A Pliocene lava flow, here informally termed the Tetherow basalt, issued from vents near Redmond, in the Deschutes basin of Oregon, as a plains-forming basalt now exposed...
Evaluating spatial coverage of the greater sage-grouse umbrella to conserve sagebrush-dependent species biodiversity within the Wyoming basins
Cameron L. Aldridge, D. Joanne Saher, Julie A. Heinrichs, Adrian P. Monroe, Matthias Leu, Steve E. Hanser
2024, Land (13)
Biodiversity is threatened due to land-use change, overexploitation, pollution, and anthropogenic climate change, altering ecosystem functioning around the globe. Protecting areas rich in biodiversity is often difficult without fully understanding and mapping species’ ecological niche requirements. As a result, the umbrella species concept is often applied, whereby conservation of...
Recent increases in annual, seasonal, and extreme methane fluxes driven by changes in climate and vegetation in boreal and temperate wetland ecosystems
Sarah Feron, Avni Malhotra, Sheel Bansal, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Gavin McNicol, Sarah Knox, Kyle Delwiche, Raul Cordero, Zutao Ouyang, Zhen Zhang, Benjamin Poulter, Robert B. Jackson
2024, Global Change Biology (30)
Climate warming is expected to increase global methane (CH4) emissions from wetland ecosystems. Although in situ eddy covariance (EC) measurements at ecosystem scales can potentially detect CH4 flux changes, most EC systems have only a few years of data collected, so temporal trends in CH4 remain uncertain. Here, we use established drivers to...
Scattered tree death contributes to substantial forest loss in California
Yang Cheng, Stefan Oehmcke, Martin Brandt, Lisa Micaela Rosenthal, Adrian Das, Anton Vrieling, Sassan Saatchi, Fabien Wagner, Maurice Mugabowindekwe, Wim Verbruggen, Claus Beier, Stephanie Horion
2024, Nature Communications (15)
In recent years, large-scale tree mortality events linked to global change have occurred around the world. Current forest monitoring methods are crucial for identifying mortality hotspots, but systematic assessments of isolated or scattered dead trees over large areas are needed to reduce uncertainty on the actual...
Facilitating comparable research in seedling functional ecology
Daniel E. Winkler, Magda Garbowski, Kevin Kozic, Emma Ladouceur, Julie Larson, Sarah Martin, Christoph Rosche, Christiane Roscher, Mandy L. Slate, Lotte Korell
2024, Methods in Ecology & Evolution (15) 464-476
Ecologists have worked to ascribe function to the variation found in plant populations, communities and ecosystems across environments for at least the past century. The vast body of research in functional ecology has drastically improved understanding of how individuals respond to their environment, communities are assembled and ecosystems function....
Water-quality characteristics of the Red River of the North and tributaries in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area, North Dakota, 2019–22
Joel M. Galloway, Rochelle A. Nustad, Spencer L. Wheeling
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5136
The Flood Risk Management Project was initiated in 2008 in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area to reduce flood risk, flood damages, and flood protection costs in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area. In cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey initiated a water-quality monitoring study to describe the...
The 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake: Intensities and ground motions
Susan E. Hough, Roger Bilham
2024, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (114) 1658-1679
The 1 September 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake was one of the largest preinstrumental earthquakes in eastern North America for which extensive contemporaneous observations were documented. The distribution of shaking was mapped shortly after the earthquake, and reconsidered by several authors in the late twentieth century, but has not been...
Flood of October 31 to November 3, 2019, in the East Canada Creek, West Canada Creek, and Sacandaga River basins in central New York
Alexander P. Graziano, Christopher L. Gazoorian, Travis L. Smith, Arthur G. Lilienthal III
2024, Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5126
Between October 31 and November 3, 2019, historic flooding in localized areas of the Mohawk Valley and southern Adirondack region in central New York State resulted in one fatality and an estimated $33 million in damages. Flooding resulted from high-intensity, hyperlocal rainfall in the region within a 24-hour period between...
A machine learning tool for design of behavioral fish barriers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta
Nicholas M. Swyers, Aaron R. Blake, Paul Stumpner, Jon R. Burau, Summer M. Burdick, Mohamed Shahid Anwar
2024, Open-File Report 2023-1095
Executive SummarySurvival of out-migrating juvenile salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta averages less than 33 percent, depending on water flow through the delta, and is partially governed by the distribution of fish among three Sacramento River distributaries: Sutter, Steamboat, and Georgiana sloughs. Behavioral altering structures in the...
National shoreline change—Summary statistics of shoreline change from the 1800s to the 2010s for the coast of California
Meredith G. Kratzmann
2024, Data Report 1187
Rates of shoreline change have been updated for the open-ocean sandy coastline of California as part of studies conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey. Shorelines from the original assessment (1800s through 1998 or 2002), as well as additional shoreline position data from 2009 to 2011, 2015, and 2016 extracted from...
National-scale remotely sensed lake trophic state from 1984 through 2020
Michael Frederick Meyer, Simon Nemer Topp, Tyler V. King, Robert Ladwig, Rachel M. Pilla, Hilary A. Dugan, Jack R. Eggleston, Stephanie E. Hampton, Dina M. Leech, Isabella Oleksy, Jesse Cleveland Ross, Matthew V Ross, R. Iestyn Woolway, Xiao Yang, Matthew R. Brousil, Kate Colleen Fickas, Julie C Padowski, Amina Pollard, Jianning Ren, Jacob Aaron Zwart
2024, Scientific Data (11)
Lake trophic state is a key ecosystem property that integrates a lake’s physical, chemical, and biological processes. Despite the importance of trophic state as a gauge of lake water quality, standardized and machine-readable observations are uncommon. Remote sensing presents an opportunity to detect and analyze lake...
Plant macrofossil data for 48-0 ka in the USGS North American Packrat Midden Database, version 5.0
Laura E. Strickland, Robert S. Thompson, Sarah Shafer, Patrick J. Bartlein, Richard T. Pelltier, Katherine H Anderson, R. Randall Schumann, Andrew K. McFadden
2024, Scientific Data (11)
Plant macrofossils from packrat (Neotoma spp.) middens provide direct evidence of past vegetation changes in arid regions of North America. Here we describe the newest version (version 5.0) of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) North American Packrat Midden Database. The database contains published and contributed data from...
Accelerating elevation gain indicates land loss associated with erosion in Mississippi River Deltaic Plain tidal wetlands
Camille Stagg, Leigh Anne Sharp, Emily N. Fromenthal, Brady Couvillion, Victoria Woltz, Sarai Piazza
2024, Estuaries and Coasts (47) 2106-2118
In recent years, the Mississippi River Deltaic Plain (MRDP) has experienced the highest rates of wetland loss in the USA. Although the process of vertical drowning has been heavily studied in coastal wetlands, less is known about the relationship between elevation change and land loss in...
Does daily activity overlap of seven mesocarnivores vary based on human development?
Leah McTigue, Ellery V. Lassiter, Mike Shaw, Emily Johansson, Ken Wilson, Brett Alexander DeGregorio
2024, PLoS ONE (19)
Many species of wildlife alter their daily activity patterns in response to co-occurring species as well as the surrounding environment. Often smaller or subordinate species alter their activity patterns to avoid being active at the same time as larger, dominant species to avoid agonistic interactions. Human development can complicate interspecies...
Evolution of a lake margin recorded in the Sutton Island member of the Murray formation, Gale crater, Mars
Samantha Gwizd, Christopher M. Fedo, John P. Grotzinger, Steve G. Banham, Frances Rivera-Hernandez, Sanjeev Gupta, Kathryn M. Stack, Lauren A. Edgar, Ashwin R. Vasavada, Joel M. Davis, Linda C. Kah
2024, Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets (129)
This study uses data from the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover to document the facies of the Sutton Island member of the Murray formation, interpret paleoenvironments, and establish key stratigraphic transitions at Gale crater. Two facies associations were identified: Facies Association 1 (FA1) and Facies Association 2...
Quantifying effectiveness and best practices for bumblebee identification from photographs
Anne Colgan, Richard G. Hatfield, Amy Dolan, Wendy Velman, Rebecca Newton, Tabitha A. Graves
2024, Scientific Reports (14)
Understanding pollinator networks requires species level data on pollinators. New photographic approaches to identification provide avenues to data collection that reduce impacts on declining bumblebee species, but limited research has addressed their accuracy. Using blind identification of 1418 photographed bees, of which 561 had paired specimens,...
Machine learning approaches to identify lithium concentration in petroleum produced waters
Emil Attanasi, Timothy Coburn, Philip A. Freeman
2024, Mineral Economics (37) 477-497
Prices for battery-grade lithium have increased substantially since 2020, which is propelling the search for additional sources of this important element. Battery-grade lithium is predominately recovered from continental brines. Most crude oil and natural gas wells recover briny formation water, which may represent an additional source. Chemical analysis of these...
