Temporal constraints on the potential role of fry odors as cues of past reproductive success for spawning lake trout
Tyler J. Buchinger, J. Ellen Marsden, Thomas R. Binder, Mar Huertas, Ugo Bussy, Ke Li, James E. Hanson, Charles C. Krueger, Weiming Li, Nicholas S. Johnson
2017, Ecology and Evolution (7) 10196-10206
Deciding where to reproduce is a major challenge for most animals. Many select habitats based upon cues of successful reproduction by conspecifics, such as the presence of offspring from past reproductive events. For example, some fishes select spawning habitat following odors released by juveniles whose rearing habitat overlaps with spawning...
Probing magma reservoirs to improve volcano forecasts
Jacob B. Lowenstern, Thomas W. Sisson, Shaul Hurwitz
2017, Eos, Earth and Space Science News (98)
When it comes to forecasting eruptions, volcano observatories rely mostly on real-time signals from earthquakes, ground deformation, and gas discharge, combined with probabilistic assessments based on past behavior [Sparks and Cashman, 2017]. There is comparatively less reliance on geophysical and petrological understanding of subsurface magma reservoirs....
Examining the value of global seasonal reference evapotranspiration forecasts to support FEWS NET’s food insecurity outlooks
Shraddhanand Shukla, Daniel McEvoy, Michael Hobbins, Gregory Husak, Justin Huntington, Chris Funk, Denis Macharia, James P. Verdin
2017, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (56) 2941-2949
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) team provides food insecurity outlooks for several developing countries in Africa, Central Asia, and Central America. This study describes development of a new global reference evapotranspiration (ETo) seasonal reforecast and skill evaluation with a particular emphasis on the potential use of this...
Near-field receiving water monitoring of trace metals and a benthic community near the Palo Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant in south San Francisco Bay, California; 2016
Daniel J. Cain, Janet K. Thompson, Francis Parchaso, Sarah A. Pearson, A. Robin Stewart, Mathew Turner, David Barasch, Samuel N. Luoma
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1135
Trace-metal concentrations in sediment and in the clam Macoma petalum (formerly reported as Macoma balthica), clam reproductive activity, and benthic macroinvertebrate community structure were investigated in a mudflat 1 kilometer south of the discharge of the Palo Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant (PARWQCP) in south San Francisco Bay,...
Movements and habitat use of White-fronted Geese (Anser albifrons frontalis) during the remigial molt in arctic Alaska, USA
Paul L. Flint, Brandt W. Meixell
2017, Waterbirds (40) 272-281
Proposed oil and gas leasing in the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska has raised questions about possible impacts of development on molting Greater White-fronted Geese (Anser albifrons frontalis) and their habitats. We used GPS transmitters to record fine-scale location data of molting and post-molt White-fronted Geese to assess patterns of...
Hydrogeology and water quality of sand and gravel aquifers in McHenry County, Illinois, 2009–14, and comparison to conditions in 1979
Amy M. Gahala
2017, Scientific Investigations Report 2017-5112
Baseline conditions for the sand and gravel aquifers (groundwater) in McHenry County, Illinois, were assessed using data from a countywide network of 44 monitoring wells collecting continuous water-level data from 2009–14. In 2010, water-quality data were collected from 41 of the monitoring wells, along with five additional monitoring wells...
Organizing the pantry: cache management improves quality of overwinter food stores in a montane mammal
Rhiannon P. Jakopak, L. Embere Hall, Anna D. Chalfoun
2017, Journal of Mammalogy (98) 1674-1681
Many mammals create food stores to enhance overwinter survival in seasonal environments. Strategic arrangement of food within caches may facilitate the physical integrity of the cache or improve access to high-quality food to ensure that cached resources meet future nutritional demands. We used the American pika (Ochotona princeps), a food-caching...
Best practices for assessing forage fish fisheries-seabird resource competition
William J. Sydeman, Sarah Ann Thompson, Tycho Anker-Nilssen, Mayumi L. Arimitsu, Ashley Bennison, Sophie Bertrand, Philipp Boersch-Supan, Charlotte Boyd, Nicole C. Bransome, Robert J.M. Crawford, Francis Daunt, Robert W. Furness, Dimas Gianuca, Amanda Gladics, Laura Koehn, Jennifer W. Lang, Elizabeth Loggerwell, Taryn L. Morris, Elizabeth M. Phillips, Jennifer Provencher, Andre E. Punt, Claire Saraux, Lynne Shannon, Richard B. Sherley, Alejandro Simeone, Ross M. Wanless, Sarah Wanless, Stephani Zador
2017, Fisheries Research (194) 209-221
Worldwide, in recent years capture fisheries targeting lower-trophic level forage fish and euphausiid crustaceans have been substantial (∼20 million metric tons [MT] annually). Landings of forage species are projected to increase in the future, and this harvest may affect marine ecosystems and predator-prey interactions by removal or redistribution of biomass...
Methods for converting continuous shrubland ecosystem component values to thematic National Land Cover Database classes
Matthew B. Rigge, Leila Gass, Collin G. Homer, George Z. Xian
2017, Open-File Report 2017-1119
The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides thematic land cover and land cover change data at 30-meter spatial resolution for the United States. Although the NLCD is considered to be the leading thematic land cover/land use product and overall classification accuracy across the NLCD is high, performance and consistency in...
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...
Buried shallow fault slip from the South Napa earthquake revealed by near-field geodesy
Benjamin A. Brooks, Sarah E. Minson, Craig L. Glennie, Johanna Nevitt, Timothy E. Dawson, Ron S. Rubin, Todd Ericksen, David A. Lockner, Kenneth W. Hudnut, Victoria E. Langenheim, Andrew Lutz, Jessica R. Murray, David P. Schwartz, Dana Zaccone
2017, Science Advances (3)
Earthquake-related fault slip in the upper hundreds of meters of Earth’s surface has remained largely unstudied because of challenges measuring deformation in the near field of a fault rupture. We analyze centimeter-scale accuracy mobile laser scanning (MLS) data of deformed vine rows within ±300 m of the principal surface expression...
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...
Strong SH-to-Love wave scattering off the Southern California Continental Borderland
Chunquan Yu, Zhongwen Zhan, Egill Hauksson, Elizabeth S. Cochran
2017, Geophysical Research Letters (44) 10208-10215
Seismic scattering is commonly observed and results from wave propagation in heterogeneous medium. Yet, deterministic characterization of scatterers associated with lateral heterogeneities remains challenging. In this study, we analyze broadband waveforms recorded by the Southern California Seismic Network and observe strongly scattered Love waves following the arrival of teleseismic SH...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
Biostratigraphic and morphometric analyses of specimens from the calcareous nannofossil genus Tribrachiatus
Jean Self-Trail, Ellen Seefelt, Claire L. Shepherd, Victoria A. Martin
2017, Journal of Nannoplankton Research (37) 177-188
Biostratigraphic and morphometric analyses of calcareous nannofossil assemblages from one outcrop and two cored sections of lower Eocene sediments reveal the presence of two new species: Tribrachiatus lunatus sp. nov., and Tribrachiatus absidatus sp. nov. Differences between the new species and Tribrachiatus orthostylus are discussed. The first occurrence...
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...
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...
