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Ongoing climate change poses significant threats to plant function and distribution. Increased temperatures and altered precipitation regimes amplify drought frequency and intensity, elevating plant stress and mortality. Large-scale forest mortality events will have far-reaching impacts on carbon and hydrological cycling, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. However, biogeographical theory and global vegetation...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution, future, and global applicability of the U.S. National Park Service's (NPS) visitor spending effects framework and discusses the methods used to effectively communicate the economic return on investment in America's national parks. The 417 parks represent many of America's most iconic destinations:...

Multiple, independent time markers are essential to correlate sediment and ice cores from the terrestrial, marine and glacial realms. These records constrain global paleoclimate reconstructions and inform future climate change scenarios. In the Northern Hemisphere, sub-visible layers of volcanic ash (cryptotephra) are valuable time markers due to their widespread dispersal...

Ecotoxicological studies have provided extensive insights into the lethal and sublethal effects of environmental contaminants. These insights are critical for environmental regulatory frameworks, which rely on knowledge of toxicity for developing policies to manage contaminants. While varied approaches have been applied to ecotoxicological questions, perspectives related to the evolutionary history...

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Rhode Island DOT are assessing and addressing roadway contributions to total maximum daily loads (TMDLs). Example analyses for total nitrogen, total phosphorus, suspended sediment, and total zinc in highway runoff were done by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with FHWA to...

Federal land managers and ranchers often use prescribed fire as a tool to reduce invading woody plants within desert grasslands of the arid southwestern United States. Managers must evaluate the threat of the burn toward the health and survival of plants of concern including how preemptive clearing before prescribed fire...

Speyeria idalia is a prairie specialist that has experienced dramatic population declines throughout its range. Speyeria idalia is nearly extirpated from the eastern portion of its former range; however, populations within Kansas are relatively stable. We made several previously undescribed field observations of late-instar larvae and post-diapause female S. idalia in northeastern Kansas during 2014–2016. We...

Mammalian herbivory and exotic plant species interactions are an important ongoing research topic, due to their presumed impacts on native biodiversity. The extent to which these interactions affect forest understory plant community composition and persistence was the subject of our study. We conducted a 5-year, 2 × 2 factorial experiment...

In the early 1980s, the Space Science Board (SSB) of the National Research Council was concerned about the poor and inconsistent treatment of scientific information returned from NASA’s space science missions. The SSB formed a panel [The Committee on Data Management and Computation (CODMAC)] to assess the situation and make...

Conventional characterization and monitoring of hydrocarbon (HC) pollution is often expensive and time-consuming. Magnetic susceptibility (MS) has been proposed as an inexpensive, long-term monitoring proxy of the degradation of HC. We acquired repeated down hole MS logging data in boreholes at a HC-contaminated field research site in Bemidji, MN, USA....

Concerns about declines in the abundance of lesser scaup (Aythya affinis) have promoted a number of analyses to understand reasons for this decline. Unfortunately, most of these analyses, including that of Arnold et al. (2016 Journal of Wildlife Management 80: 850–861), are based on observational studies leading to weak inference....

Eruption ages of a number of prominent Quaternary volcanic deposits remain inaccurately and/or imprecisely constrained, despite their importance as regional stratigraphic markers in paleo-environment reconstruction and as evidence of climate-altering eruptions. Accurately dating volcanic deposits presents challenging analytical considerations, including poor radiogenic yield, scarcity of datable minerals, and contamination of...

This paper introduces a framework for examining connections between the flow field, the texture of the air-water interface, and the reflectance of the water surface and thus evaluating the potential to infer hydraulic information from remotely sensed observations of surface reflectance. We used a spatial correlation model describing water surface...

Concern over the potential impact of anthropogenic climate change on flooding has led to a proliferation of studies examining past flood trends. Many studies have analysed annual-maximum flow trends but few have quantified changes in major (25–100 year return period) floods, i.e. those that have the greatest societal impacts. Existing major-flood...

Telemetry can inform many scientific and research questions if a context exists for integrating individual studies into the larger body of literature. Creating cumulative distributions of post-tagging evaluation metrics would allow individual researchers to relate their telemetry data to other studies. Widespread reporting of standard metrics is a precursor to...

Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHAB) cause extensive problems in lakes worldwide, including human and ecological health risks, anoxia and fish kills, and taste and odor problems. CyanoHABs are a particular concern in both recreational waters and drinking water sources because of their dense biomass and the risk of exposure to...

Managers are increasingly implementing reintroduction programs as part of a global effort to alleviate amphibian declines. Given uncertainty in factors affecting populations and a need to make recurring decisions to achieve objectives, adaptive management is a useful component of these efforts. A major impediment to the estimation of demographic rates...

The evolutionary effects of harvest on wild fish populations have been documented around the world; however, sublethal selective pressures can also cause evolutionary changes in phenotypes. For migratory fishes, passage facilities may represent instances of nonlethal selective pressure. Our analysis of 6 years of passage data suggests that certain fish passage...

Climate change is modifying global biogeochemical cycles. Microbial communities play an integral role in soil biogeochemical cycles; knowledge about microbial composition helps provide a mechanistic understanding of these ecosystem-level phenomena. Next generation sequencing approaches were used to investigate changes in microbial functional groups during ecosystem development, in response to climate...

Acoustic recorders can be useful for studying bird populations but their efficiency and accuracy should be assessed in pertinent ecological settings before use. We investigated the utility of an acoustic recorder for monitoring abundance of tundra‐breeding birds relative to point‐count surveys in northwestern Alaska, USA, during 2014. Our objectives were...

Ascent of magma through Earth's crust is normally associated with, among other effects, ground deformation and gravity changes. Geodesy is thus a valuable tool for monitoring and hazards assessment during volcanic unrest, and it provides valuable data for exploring the geometry and volume of magma plumbing systems. Recent decades have...

Crayfish are ecologically important in freshwater systems worldwide and are imperiled in North America and globally. We sought to examine landscape- to local-scale environmental variables related to occupancy and detection probability of a suite of stream-dwelling crayfish species. We used a quantitative kickseine method to sample crayfish presence at 102...

To experimentally validate a recently developed theory for predicting the stability of cut slopes under unsaturated conditions, the authors measured increasing strain localization in unsaturated slope cuts prior to abrupt failure. Cut slope width and moisture content were controlled and varied in a laboratory, and a sliding door that extended...

In the New England states, tree wardens are local officials responsible for the preservation, maintenance and stewardship of municipal public trees. This study explores the emerging professional challenges, duties and responsibilities of tree wardens, from the subject’s point of view, by conducting in-person, semi-structured qualitative research interviews with 50 tree...

According to the 2005 U.S. Geological Survey national water use compilation, irrigation is the second largest use of fresh water in the United States, accounting for 37%, or 484.48 million cubic meters per day, of total freshwater withdrawal. Accurately estimating the amount of water withdrawals and actual consumptive water use...