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Fallout radionuclides, 7Be and 210Pbex, sampled in bed sediment for 99 watersheds in the Midwestern region of the United States and in 15 samples of suspended sediment from 3 of these watersheds were used to partition upland from channel sources and to estimate the age or the time since the surface-derived portion...

Climate change is poised to alter the distributional limits, center, and size of many species. Traits may influence different aspects of range shifts, with trophic generality facilitating shifts at the leading edge, and greater thermal tolerance limiting contractions at the trailing edge. The generality of relationships between traits and range...

Japan’s wolves were extinct by 1905. Today Japan's mountain forests are being killed by overabundant sika deer and wild boars. Since the early 1990s, the Japan Wolf Association has proposed wolf reintroduction to Japan to restore rural ecology and to return a culturally important animal. In this article...

Historically, it is believed that crystalline uraninite, produced via the abiotic reduction of hexavalent uranium (U(VI)) is the dominant reduced U species formed in low-temperature uranium roll-front ore deposits. Here we show that non-crystalline U(IV) generated through biologically mediated U(VI) reduction is the predominant U(IV) species in an undisturbed U roll-front ore deposit...

Localized ecological conditions have the potential to induce variation in population characteristics such as size distributions and body conditions. The ability to generalize the influence of ecological characteristics on such population traits may be particularly meaningful when those traits influence prospects for successful management interventions. To characterize variability in invasive...

The compound BMAA (β-N-methylamino-L-alanine) has been postulated to play a significant role in four serious neurological human diseases: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/Parkinsonism Dementia Complex (ALS/PDC) found on Guam, and ALS, Parkinsonism, and dementia that occur globally. ALS/PDC with symptoms of all three diseases first came to the attention of the scientific...

Adsorption using activated alumina is a simple method for removing fluoride from drinking water, but to be cost effective the adsorption capacity must be high and effective long-term. The intent of this study was to assess changes in its adsorption capacity under varied conditions. This...

The Arctic is among the fastest warming regions on Earth, but it is also one with limited spatial coverage of multidecadal instrumental surface air temperature measurements. Consequently, atmospheric reanalyses are relatively unconstrained in this region, resulting in a large spread of estimated 30 year recent warming trends, which limits their use...

During breeding, foraging marine birds are under biological, geographic, and temporal constraints. These contraints require foraging birds to efficiently process environmental cues derived from physical habitat features that occur at nested spatial scales. Mesoscale oceanography in particular may change rapidly within and between breeding seasons, and findings from well-studied systems...

Restoring the natural or historical state of ecosystems is a common objective among resource managers, but determining whether desired system responses to management actions are occurring is often protracted and challenging. For wildlife, the integration of mechanistic habitat modeling with population monitoring may provide expedited measures of management effectiveness and...

Coastal hydrodynamics can be greatly affected by the presence of submerged aquatic vegetation. The effect of vegetation has been incorporated into the Coupled-Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) Modeling System. The vegetation implementation includes the plant-induced three-dimensional drag, in-canopy wave-induced streaming, and the production of turbulent kinetic energy by the presence of...

The Midwest United States is an intensely agricultural region where pesticides in streams pose risks to aquatic biota, but temporal variability in pesticide concentrations makes characterization of their exposure to organisms challenging. To compensate for the effects of temporal variability, we deployed polar organic chemical integrative samplers (POCIS) in 100...

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The impact of a structured environment on genome evolution can be determined through comparative population genomics of species that live in the same habitat. Recent work comparing three genome sequences of Sulfolobus acidocaldarius suggested that highly structured, extreme, hot spring environments do not limit dispersal of this thermoacidophile, in contrast to other...

Humans have greatly affected the genetic composition of many different organisms during the Anthropocene. Humans cause genetic changes by affecting the direction and magnitude of evolutionary forces that act to create the Earth's biota. In many cases, we expect the outcome of human actions to be extinction and hybridization of...

The Gulf of Mexico is a conspicuous feature of the Neotropical–Nearctic bird migration system. Traveling long distances across ecological barriers comes with considerable risks, and mortality associated with intercontinental migration may be substantial, including that caused by storms or other adverse weather events. However, little, if anything, is known about...

Estimation of transition probabilities of sessile communities seems easy in principle but may still be difficult in practice because resampling error (i.e. a failure to resample exactly the same location at fixed points) may cause significant estimation bias. Previous studies have developed novel analytical methods to correct...

Although climate change is an important factor affecting inland fishes globally, a comprehensive review of how climate change has impacted and will continue to impact inland fishes worldwide does not currently exist. We conducted an extensive, systematic primary literature review to identify English-language, peer-reviewed journal publications with projected and documented...

Understanding species–habitat relationships for endangered species is critical for their conservation. However, many studies have limited value for conservation because they fail to account for habitat associations at multiple spatial scales, anthropogenic variables, and imperfect detection. We addressed these three limitations by developing models for an endangered wetland bird, Yuma...

We evaluated total mercury (THg) concentrations and trends in polar bears from the southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation from 2004 to 2011. Hair THg concentrations ranged widely among individuals from 0.6 to 13.3 μg g–1 dry weight (mean: 3.5 ± 0.2 μg g–1). Concentrations differed among sex and age classes: solitary adult...

The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) targets high-priority conservation needs (e.g., water quality, wildlife habitat) by paying landowners an annual rental rate to remove environmentally sensitive or agriculturally unproductive lands from rowcrop production, and then implement conservation practices on these lands. This study examined motivations of South Dakota landowners for...

Despite the importance of hydrologic regimes to the phenology, demography, and abundance of fishes such as salmonids, there have been surprisingly few syntheses that holistically assess regional, species-specific trends in hydrologic regimes within a framework of climate change. Here, we consider hydrologic regimes within the Greater Yellowstone Area in the...

Tsunamis have the potential to cause considerable damage to communities along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coastline. As coastal communities expand over time, the potential societal impact of tsunami inundation changes. To understand how community exposure to tsunami hazards may change in coming decades, we projected future development (i.e. urban, residential,...

The High Plains aquifer underlies 111.8 million acres (about 175,000 square miles) in parts of eight States—Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Water-level declines began in parts of the High Plains aquifer soon after the beginning of substantial irrigation with groundwater in the aquifer area...

Oxytetracycline (OTC) has been used to mark a variety of fish species at multiple developmental stages; however, there is little information on batch-marking Lepisosteidae. Juvenile Shortnose Gar Lepisosteus platostomus (53 ± 3 mm TL) were seined from an Oklahoma State University research pond and transported to the Oklahoma Fishery Research...