Potential paths for male-mediated gene flow to and from an isolated grizzly bear population
Christopher P. Peck, Frank T. van Manen, Cecily M. Costello, Mark A. Haroldson, Lisa Landenburger, Lori L. Roberts, Daniel D. Bjornlie, Richard D. Mace
2017, Ecosphere (8) 1-19
For several decades, grizzly bear populations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) have increased in numbers and range extent. The GYE population remains isolated and although effective population size has increased since the early 1980s, genetic connectivity between these populations remains a long-term...
Monitoring eradication of European mouflon sheep from the Kahuku Unit of Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park
Seth Judge, Steven C. Hess, Jonathan K. Faford, Dexter Pacheco, Christina Leopold
2017, Pacific Science (71) 425-436
European mouflon (Ovis gmelini musimon), the world's smallest wild sheep, have proliferated and degraded fragile native ecosystems in the Hawaiian Islands through browsing, bark stripping, and trampling, including native forests within Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (HAVO). HAVO resource managers initiated ungulate control efforts in the 469 km2 Kahuku Unit after it...
Fractional crystallization-induced variations in sulfides from the Noril’sk-Talnakh mining district (polar Siberia, Russia)
C.J. Duran, S-J. Barnes, P. Plese, M. Kudrna Prasek, Michael L. Zientek, P. Page
2017, Ore Geology Reviews (90) 326-351
The distribution of platinum-group elements (PGE) within zoned magmatic ore bodies has been extensively studied and appears to be controlled by the partitioning behavior of the PGE during fractional crystallization of magmatic sulfide liquids. However, other chalcophile elements, especially TABS (Te, As, Bi, Sb, and Sn) have been neglected despite...
Statistical design and analysis for plant cover studies with multiple sources of observation errors
Wilson J. Wright, Kathryn M. Irvine, Jeffrey M . Warren, Jenny K. Barnett
2017, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (8) 1832-1841
Effective wildlife habitat management and conservation requires understanding the factors influencing distribution and abundance of plant species. Field studies, however, have documented observation errors in visually estimated plant cover including measurements which differ from the true value (measurement error) and not observing a species that is present within...
Climate change and alpine stream biology: progress, challenges, and opportunities for the future
Scott Hotaling, Debra S. Finn, J. Joseph Giersch, David W. Weisrock, Dean Jacobsen
2017, Biological Reviews (92) 2024-2045
In alpine regions worldwide, climate change is dramatically altering ecosystems and affecting biodiversity in many ways. For streams, receding alpine glaciers and snowfields, paired with altered precipitation regimes, are driving shifts in hydrology, species distributions, basal resources, and threatening the very existence of some habitats and biota. Alpine streams harbour...
Spatially explicit population estimates for black bears based on cluster sampling
J. Humm, J. Walter McCown, B.K. Scheick, Joseph D. Clark
2017, Journal of Wildlife Management (81) 1187-1201
We estimated abundance and density of the 5 major black bear (Ursus americanus) subpopulations (i.e., Eglin, Apalachicola, Osceola, Ocala-St. Johns, Big Cypress) in Florida, USA with spatially explicit capture-mark-recapture (SCR) by extracting DNA from hair samples collected at barbed-wire hair sampling sites. We employed a clustered sampling configuration with sampling...
Shallow microearthquakes near Chongqing, China triggered by the Rayleigh waves of the 2015 M7.8 Gorkha, Nepal earthquake
Libo Han, Zhigang Peng, Christopher W. Johnson, Frederick Pollitz, Lu Li, Baoshan Wang, Jing Wu, Qiang Li, Hongmei Wei
2017, Earth and Planetary Science Letters (479) 231-240
We present a case of remotely triggered seismicity in Southwest China by the 2015/04/25 M7.8 Gorkha, Nepal earthquake. A local magnitude ML3.8 event occurred near the Qijiang district south of Chongqing city approximately 12 min after the Gorkha mainshock. Within 30km of this ML3.8 event there are 62 earthquakes since...
Applying citizen-science data and mark-recapture models to estimate numbers of migrant golden eagles in an important bird area in eastern North America
Andrew J. Dennhardt, Adam E. Duerr, David Brandes, Todd E. Katzner
2017, The Condor (119) 817-831
Estimates of population abundance are important to wildlife management and conservation. However, it can be difficult to characterize the numbers of broadly distributed, low-density, and elusive bird species. Although Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) are rare, difficult to detect, and broadly distributed, they are concentrated during their autumn migration at monitoring...
Where can wolves live and how can we live with them?
L. David Mech
2017, Biological Conservation (210) 310-317
In the contiguous 48 United States, southern Canada, and in Europe, wolves (Canis lupus) have greatly increased and expanded their range during the past few decades.They are prolific, disperse long distances, readily recolonize new areas where humans allow them, and are difficult to control when populations become established.Because wolves originally...
Groundwater-level trends in the U.S. glacial aquifer system, 1964-2013
Glenn A. Hodgkins, Robert W. Dudley, Martha G. Nielsen, Benjamin Renard, Sharon L. Qi
2017, Journal of Hydrology (553) 289-303
The glacial aquifer system in the United States is a major source of water supply but previous work on historical groundwater trends across the system is lacking. Trends in annual minimum, mean, and maximum groundwater levels for 205 monitoring wells were analyzed across three regions of the system (East, Central,...
Selective transport of palynomorphs in marine turbiditic deposits: An example from the Ascension-Monterey Canyon system offshore central California
Mary McGann
2017, Quaternary International (469) 120-140
The pollen assemblage of a deep-sea core (15G) collected at lower bathyal depths (3491 m) on a levee of Monterey Canyon off central California was investigated to gain insights into the delivery processes of terrigenous material to submarine fans and the effect this transport has on the palynological record. Thirty-two...
Characterizing sources of uncertainty from global climate models and downscaling techniques
Adrienne Wootten, Adam Terando, Brian J. Reich, Ryan P. Boyles, Fred Semazzi
2017, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (56) 3245-3262
In recent years climate model experiments have been increasingly oriented towards providing information that can support local and regional adaptation to the expected impacts of anthropogenic climate change. This shift has magnified the importance of downscaling as a means to translate coarse-scale global climate model (GCM) output to a finer...
Partial polygon pruning of hydrographic features in automated generalization
Alexander K. Stum, Barbara P. Buttenfield, Larry V. Stanislawski
2017, Transactions in GIS (21) 1061-1078
This paper demonstrates a working method to automatically detect and prune portions of waterbody polygons to support creation of a multi-scale hydrographic database. Water features are known to be sensitive to scale change; and thus multiple representations are required to maintain visual and geographic logic at smaller scales. Partial pruning...
Systematic observations of the slip pulse properties of large earthquake ruptures
Diego Melgar, Gavin P. Hayes
2017, Geophysical Research Letters (44) 9691-9698
In earthquake dynamics there are two end member models of rupture: propagating cracks and self-healing pulses. These arise due to different properties of faults and have implications for seismic hazard; rupture mode controls near-field strong ground motions. Past studies favor the pulse-like mode of rupture; however, due to a variety...
An unparalleled opportunity for an important ecological study
L. David Mech, Shannon Barber-Meyer, Juan Carlos Blanco, Luigi Boitani, Ludwig N. Carbyn, Glenn D. DelGuidice, Steven H. Fritts, Djuro Huber, O. Liberg, Brent Patterson, Richard P. Thiel
2017, BioScience (67) 875-876
Wolves (Canis lupus) and moose (Alces americanus) have been studied since 1958 on 540-square-kilometer Isle Royale National Park, in Lake Superior. Wolves arrived there across the ice around 1949, and the population once increased to about 50, averaging about 25 annually (Mech 1966, Jordan et al. <a class="link...
Projected warming portends seasonal shifts of stream temperatures in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, USA and Canada
Leslie A. Jones, Clint C. Muhlfeld, Lucy A. Marshall
2017, Climatic Change (144) 641-655
Climate warming is expected to increase stream temperatures in mountainous regions of western North America, yet the degree to which future climate change may influence seasonal patterns of stream temperature is uncertain. In this study, a spatially explicit statistical model framework was integrated with empirical stream temperature data (approximately four...
Shear-wave velocity model from Rayleigh wave group velocities centered on the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta
Jon Peter B. Fletcher, Jemile Erdem
2017, Pure and Applied Geophysics (174) 3825-3839
Rayleigh wave group velocities obtained from ambient noise tomography are inverted for an upper crustal model of the Central Valley, California, centered on the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta. Two methods were tried; the first uses SURF96, a least-squares routine. It provides a good fit to the data, but convergence is dependent...
Delayed seismicity rate changes controlled by static stress transfer
Kayla A. Kroll, Keith B. Richards-Dinger, James H. Dieterich, Elizabeth S. Cochran
2017, Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth (122) 7951-7965
On 15 June 2010, a Mw5.7 earthquake occurred near Ocotillo, California, in the Yuha Desert. This event was the largest aftershock of the 4 April 2010 Mw7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah (EMC) earthquake in this region. The EMC mainshock and subsequent Ocotillo aftershock provide an opportunity to test the Coulomb failure hypothesis (CFS). We...
Assessing models of arsenic occurrence in drinking water from bedrock aquifers in New Hampshire
Caroline Andy, Maria Florencia Fahnestock, Melissa A. Lombard, Laura Hayes, Julie Bryce, Joseph D. Ayotte
2017, Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education (160) 25-41
Three existing multivariate logistic regression models were assessed using new data to evaluate the capacity of the models to correctly predict the probability of groundwater arsenic concentrations exceeding the threshold values of 1, 5, and 10 micrograms per liter (µg/L) in New Hampshire, USA. A recently released testing dataset includes...
U.S. Geological Survey input-data forms for the assessment of the Spraberry Formation of the Midland Basin, Permian Basin Province, Texas, 2017
Kristen R. Marra
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1117
In 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed an updated assessment of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources in the Spraberry Formation of the Midland Basin (Permian Basin Province) in southwestern Texas (Marra and others, 2017). The Spraberry Formation was assessed using both the standard continuous (unconventional) and conventional...
Simulation of daily streamflow for 12 river basins in western Iowa using the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System
Daniel E. Christiansen, Adel E. Haj, John C. Risley
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5091
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, constructed Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System models to estimate daily streamflow for 12 river basins in western Iowa that drain into the Missouri River. The Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System is a deterministic, distributed-parameter, physical-process-based modeling system developed to evaluate the...
Geologic map of the Dusar area, Herat Province, Afghanistan; Modified from the 1973 original map compilations of V.I. Tarasenko and others
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1126
The geologic maps and cross sections presented in this report are redrafted and modified versions of the Geologic map and map of useful minerals of the Dusar area (scale 1:50,000) and Geologic sketch map of the Dusar and Namak-sory ore occurrences (scale 1:10,000), located in the Herat Province, Afghanistan. The...
Some results from ModEM3DMT, the freely available OSU 3D MT inversion code
Gary D. Egbert, Naser Meqbel, Anna Kelbert
2017, Conference Paper
At the 3DEM-5 workshop in 2013, we presented a paper entitled "ModEM: developing 3D EM inversion for the masses", outlining our then recent development of a modular system for inversion of EM geophysical data, called ModEM. As promised in that presentation, we made a version of the code that is...
3D ground‐motion simulations of Mw 7 earthquakes on the Salt Lake City segment of the Wasatch fault zone: Variability of long‐period (T≥1 s) ground motions and sensitivity to kinematic rupture parameters
Morgan P. Moschetti, Stephen H. Hartzell, Leonardo Ramirez-Guzman, Arthur D. Frankel, Stephen J. Angster, William J. Stephenson
2017, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (107) 1704-1723
We examine the variability of long‐period (T≥1 s) earthquake ground motions from 3D simulations of Mw 7 earthquakes on the Salt Lake City segment of the Wasatch fault zone, Utah, from a set of 96 rupture models with varying slip distributions, rupture speeds, slip velocities, and hypocenter locations. Earthquake ruptures were prescribed on...
Movements of Atlantic Sturgeon of the Gulf of Maine inside and outside the geographically defined Distinct Population Segment
Gail S. Wippelhauser, James Sulikowski, Gayle B. Zydlewski, Megan Altenritter, Micah Kieffer, Michael T. Kinnison
2017, Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science (9) 93-107
Identification of potential critical habitat, seasonal distributions, and movements within and between river systems is important for protecting the Gulf of Maine (GOM) Distinct Population Segment of Atlantic Sturgeon. To accomplish these objectives, we captured Atlantic Sturgeon in four GOM rivers (Penobscot, Kennebec system, Saco, and Merrimack), and tagged...
