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Earth’s biodiversity and carbon uptake by plants, or primary productivity, are intricately interlinked, underlie many essential ecosystem processes, and depend on the interplay among environmental factors, many of which are being changed by human activities. While ecological theory generalizes across taxa and environments, most empirical tests of factors controlling diversity...

Researchers and practitioners alike often need to understand and characterize how water and solutes move through a stream in terms of the relative importance of in-stream and near-stream storage and transport processes. In-channel and subsurface storage processes are highly variable in space and time and difficult to measure. Storage estimates...

ContextBeyond the recognized importance of protecting large areas of contiguous habitat, conservation efforts for many species are complicated by the fact that patch suitability may also be affected by characteristics of the landscape within which the patch is located. Currently, little is known about the...

Network analysis is used to address diverse ecological, social, economic, and epidemiological questions, but few efforts have been made to combine these field-specific analyses into interdisciplinary approaches that effectively address how complex systems are interdependent and connected to one another. Identifying and understanding these cross-boundary connections improves natural resource management...

Large earthquakes can cause social and economic disruption that can be unprecedented to any given community, and the full recovery from these impacts may or may not always be achievable. In the United States (U.S.), the 1994 M6.7 Northridge earthquake in California remains the third costliest disaster in U.S. history;...

AimOur understanding of the effects of invasive species on faunal diversity is limited in part because invasions often occur in modified landscapes where other drivers of community diversity can exacerbate or reduce the net impacts of an invader. Furthermore, rigorous assessments of the effects of invasive species on native communities...

The Evergreen basin is a 40-km-long, 8-km-wide Cenozoic sedimentary basin that lies mostly concealed beneath the northeastern margin of the Santa Clara Valley near the south end of San Francisco Bay (California, USA). The basin is bounded on the northeast by the strike-slip Hayward fault and an approximately parallel subsurface...

The automation of agricultural mapping using satellite-derived remotely sensed data remains a challenge in Africa because of the heterogeneous and fragmental landscape, complex crop cycles, and limited access to local knowledge. Currently, consistent, continent-wide routine cropland mapping of Africa does not exist, with most studies focused either on certain portions...

Regional seismograms from earthquakes in Northern California show a systematic difference in arrival times across Southern California where long period (30–50 seconds) SH waves arrive up to 15 seconds earlier at stations near the coast compared with sites towards the east at similar epicentral distances. We attribute this time difference...

This is the fifty-fourth in a series of annual reports that describe groundwater conditions in Utah. Reports in this series, published cooperatively by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Utah Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water Rights, and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, Division of Water Quality, provide...

Our different kinds of minds and types of thinking affect the ways we decide, take action, and cooperate (or not). Derived from these types of minds, innate biases, beliefs, heuristics, and values (BBHV) influence behaviors, often beneficially, when individuals or small groups face immediate, local, acute situations that they and...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) can be used as an assessment tool to detect populations of threatened species and provide fine-scale data required to make management decisions. The objectives of this project were to use quantitative PCR (qPCR) to: (i) detect spiked salamander DNA in soil, (ii) quantify eDNA degradation over time,...

We present evidence of a geobattery associated with microbial degradation of a mature crude oil spill. Self-potential measurements were collected using a vertical array of nonpolarizing electrodes, starting at the land surface and passing through the smear zone where seasonal water table fluctuations have resulted in the coating of hydrocarbons...

Extraordinary marine inundation scattered clasts southward on the island of Anegada, 120 km south of the Puerto Rico Trench, sometime between 1200 and 1480 calibrated years (cal yr) CE. Many of these clasts were likely derived from a fringing reef and from the sandy flat that separates the reef...

Maintaining a balance between predator and prey populations can be an ongoing challenge for fisheries managers, especially in managing artificial ecosystems such as reservoirs. In a high-elevation Utah reservoir, the unintentional introduction of the Utah Chub Gila atraria and its subsequent population expansion prompted managers to experimentally shift from exclusively stocking Rainbow...

Urban fisheries provide unique angling opportunities for people from traditionally underrepresented demographics. Lake Raleigh is a 38-ha impoundment located on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh. Like many urban fisheries, little is known about angler use and satisfaction or how angling catch rate is related to fish availability...

Nitrogen (N) deposition affects myriad aspects of terrestrial ecosystem structure and function, and microbial communities may be particularly sensitive to anthropogenic N inputs. However, our understanding of N deposition effects on microbial communities is far from complete, especially for drylands where data are comparatively rare. To address the need for...

Drought response is widely varied depending on both the characteristics of the drought and the ability of individual ranchers to respond.Assistance from institutions during drought has not typically considered preemptive, during, and post-drought response as a strategic approach, which recognizes biophysical, sociological, and economic complexities of drought.A USDA Southwest Climate...

Stable carbon and hydrogen isotope signatures of methane, water, and inorganic carbon are widely utilized in natural gas systems for distinguishing microbial and thermogenic methane and for delineating methanogenic pathways (acetoclastic, hydrogenotrophic, and/or methylotrophic methanogenesis). Recent studies of coal and shale gas systems have characterized in situ microbial communities...

No abstract available....

Sampling of mallards in Alaska during September 2014–April 2015 identified low pathogenic avian influenza A virus (subtypes H5N2 and H1N1) that shared ancestry with highly pathogenic reassortant H5N2 and H5N1 viruses. Molecular dating indicated reassortment soon after interhemispheric movement of H5N8 clade 2.3.4.4, suggesting genetic exchange in Alaska or surrounds...

In response to degraded water quality, federal policy makers in the US and Canada called for a 40% reduction in phosphorus (P) loads to Lake Erie, and state and provincial policy makers in the Great Lakes region set a load-reduction target for the year 2025. Here, we configured five separate...

No abstract available....

Species vulnerability is increased when individuals congregate in restricted areas for breeding; yet, breeding habitats are not well defined for many marine species. Identification and quantification of these breeding habitats are essential to effective conservation. Satellite telemetry and switching state-space modeling (SSM) were used to define inter-nesting habitat of endangered...

No abstract available....