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Aim: The geographical extent and climatic tolerances of one- and two-needled pinyon pines (Pinus subsect. Cembroides) are the focus of questions in taxonomy, palaeoclimatology and modelling of future distributions. The identification of these pines, traditionally classified by one- versus two-needled fascicles, is complicated by populations with both one- and two-needled...

Aim: To understand why and when areas of endemism (provinces) of the tropical Atlantic Ocean were formed, how they relate to each other, and what processes have contributed to faunal enrichment. Location: Atlantic Ocean. Methods: The distributions of 2605 species of reef fishes were compiled for 25 areas of the...

An unsaturated-zone transport model was used to examine the transport and fate of metolachlor applied to an agricultural site in Maryland, USA. The study site was instrumented to collect data on soil-water content, soil-water potential, ground water levels, major ions, pesticides, and nutrients from the unsaturated zone during 2002-2004. The...

Although numerous studies of hyporheic exchange and denitrification have been conducted in pristine, high-gradient streams, few studies of this type have been conducted in nutrient-rich, low-gradient streams. This is a particularly important subject given the interest in nitrogen (N) inputs to the Gulf of Mexico and other eutrophic aquatic systems....

We examined mercury concentrations and space use of prebreeding Forster's terns (Sterna forsteri) in San Francisco Bay, California, USA, to assess factors influencing mercury levels in piscivorous birds. In 2005 and 2006, we collected blood and feathers from 122 Forster's terns and radio-marked and tracked 72 terns to determine locations...

Geospatial patterns of forest fragmentation over the three traditional giant forested areas of China (Northeastern, southwestern and Southern China) were analyzed comparatively and reported based on a 250-m resolution land cover dataset. Specifically, the spatial patterns of forest fragmentation were characterized by combining geospatial metrics and forest fragmentation models. The...

Loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) sea turtle distributions and movements in offshore waters of the western North Atlantic are not well understood despite continued efforts to monitor, survey, and observe them. Loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles are listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union, and thus anthropogenic...

The pre-cold-frontal low-level jet within oceanic extratropical cyclones represents the lower-tropospheric component of a deeper corridor of concentrated water vapor transport in the cyclone warm sector. These corridors are referred to as atmospheric rivers (ARs) because they are narrow relative to their length scale and are responsible for most of...

Conventional solute transport models do not adequately account for the effects of phreatophytic plant systems on contaminant concentrations in shallow groundwater systems. A numerical model was developed and tested to simulate threedimensional reactive solute transport in a heterogeneous porous medium. Advective-dispersive transport is coupled to biodegradation, sorption, and plantbased attenuation...

The impact of human activities on biogeochemical cycles in terrestrial environments is nowhere more apparent than in urban landscapes. Trace metals, collected on roadways and transported by storm water, may contaminate soils and sediments associated with storm water management systems. These systems will accumulate metals and associated sediments may reach...

New SHRIMP-RG (sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe-reverse geometry) data confirm the existence of Archean components within zircon grains of a sample from the orthogneiss of Angel Lake, Nevada, United States, previously interpreted as a nappe of Archean crust. However, the combined evidence strongly suggests that this orthogneiss is a highly deformed,...

Fractionation of Cu and Zn isotopes during adsorption onto amorphous ferric oxyhydroxide is examined in experimental mixtures of metal-rich acid rock drainage and relatively pure river water and during batch adsorption experiments using synthetic ferrihydrite. A diverse set of Cu- and Zn-bearing...

In this work the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is applied to investigate the flow and transport processes at the macro-dispersion experiment (MADE) site in Columbus, MS. The EnKF is a sequential data assimilation approach that adjusts the unknown model parameter values based on the observed data with time. The classic...

Geophysical surveys, sedimentology, and optically-stimulated luminescence age analyses were used to assess the geologic development of a coastal system near Swansboro, NC. This area is a significant Woodland Period Native American habitation and is designated the "Broad Reach" archaeological site. 2-d and 3-d subsurface geophysical surveys were performed using a...

Consistent assessments of biological condition are needed across multiple ecoregions to provide a greater understanding of the spatial extent of environmental degradation. However, consistent assessments at large geographic scales are often hampered by lack of uniformity in data collection, analyses, and interpretation. The index of biotic integrity (IBI) has been...

An iterative inverse method, the sequential self-calibration method, is developed for mapping spatial distribution of a hydraulic conductivity field by conditioning on nonreactive tracer breakthrough curves. A streamline-based, semi-analytical simulator is adopted to simulate solute transport in a heterogeneous aquifer. The simulation is used as the forward modeling step. In...

In the arid Mojave Desert, the phenological response of vegetation is largely dependent upon the timing and amount of rainfall, and maps of annual plant cover at any one point in time can vary widely. Our study developed relative annual plant growth models as proxies for annual plant cover using...

Sea ice thickness (SIT) is a key parameter of scientific interest because understanding the natural spatiotemporal variability of ice thickness is critical for improving global climate models. In this paper, changes in Arctic SIT during 1982-2003 are examined using a neural network (NN) algorithm trained with in situ submarine ice...

Although the quantity of data on the location, status, and management of invasive species is ever increasing, invasive species data sets are often difficult to obtain and integrate. A cyberinfrastructure for such information could make these data available for Internet users. The data can be used to create regional watch...

Conservation prioritization usually focuses on conservation of rare species or biodiversity, rather than ecological processes. This is partially due to a lack of informative indicators of ecosystem function. Biological soil crusts (BSCs) trap and retain soil and water resources in arid ecosystems and function as major carbon and nitrogen fixers;...

We describe newly developed remote sensing tools to map the localized occurrences and regional distribution of the marsh dieback in coastal Louisiana (Fig. 1). As a final goal of our research and development, we identified what spectral features accompanied the onset of dieback and could be directly linked to the...

The temporal and spatial structure of 332 404 daily fire-start records from the western United States for the period 1986 through 1996 is illustrated using several complimentary visualisation techniques. We supplement maps and time series plots with Hovmo??ller diagrams that reduce the spatial dimensionality of the daily data in order...

The permeability of continental crust is so highly variable that it is often considered to defy systematic characterization. However, despite this variability, some order has been gleaned from globally compiled data. What accounts for the apparent coherence of mean permeability in the continental crust (and permeability–depth relations) on a very...

Global land surface runoff and sea surface temperatures (SST) are analyzed to identify the primary modes of variability of these hydroclimatic data for the period 1905-2002. A monthly water-balance model first is used with global monthly temperature and precipitation data to compute time series of annual gridded runoff for the...

The open-source, public domain JUPITER (Joint Universal Parameter IdenTification and Evaluation of Reliability) API (Application Programming Interface) provides conventions and Fortran-90 modules to develop applications (computer programs) for analyzing process models. The input and output conventions allow application users to access various applications and the analysis methods they embody with...