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Publications

Collection of Publications provided or contributed by SSAR programs. Selecting an item you'll find additional information and program point of contacts.

Filter Total Items: 250

BbsAssistant: An R package for downloading and handling data and information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey

This R package contains functions for downloading and munging data from the U.S. Geological Surveys North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) via file transfer protocol (FTP) (Pardieck, Ziolkowski Jr, Lutmerding, & Hudson, 2018; J. R. Sauer et al., 2017). This package was created to allow the user to bulk-download the BBS point count and related (e.g., route-level conditions) via FTP, and to quick
Authors
Jessica Leigh Burnett, Lyndsie S. Wszola, Gabriela Palomo-Muñoz

The power, potential, and pitfalls of open access biodiversity data in range size assessments: Lessons from the fishes

Geographic rarity is a driver of a species’ intrinsic risk of extinction. It encompasses multiple key components including range size, which is one of the most commonly measured estimates of geographic rarity. Range size estimates are often used to prioritize conservation efforts when there are multiple candidate species, because data for other components of rarity such as population size are spar
Authors
Abigail Benson

Measuring sustainability of seed-funded Earth science informatics projects

Short term funding is a common funding model for informatics projects. Funders are interested in maximizing the sustainability and accessibility of the outputs, but there are no commonly accepted practices to do so in the Earth sciences informatics field. We constructed and applied a framework for sustainability drawing from other disciplines that have more published work in sustainability of proj
Authors
Leslie Hsu, Vivian B. Hutchison, Madison Langseth

Improving Darwin Core for research and management of alien species

To improve the suitability of the Darwin Core standard for the research and management of alien species, the standard needs to express the native status of organisms, how well established they are and how they came to occupy a location. To facilitate this, we propose: 1. To adopt a controlled vocabulary for the existing Darwin Core term dwc:establishmentMeans 2. To elevate the pathway term from th
Authors
Quentin J. Groom, Peter Desmet, Lien Reyserhove, Tim Adriaens, Damiano Oldoni, Sonia Vanderhoeven, Steven J Baskauf, Arthur Chapman, Melodie McGeoch, Ramona Walls, John Wieczorek, John RU Wilson, Paula FF Zermoglio, Annie Simpson

Urban stormwater: An overlooked pathway of extensive mixed contaminants to surface and groundwaters in the United States

Increasing global reliance on stormwater control measures to reduce discharge to surface water, increase groundwater recharge, and minimize contaminant delivery to receiving waterbodies necessitates improved understanding of stormwater-contaminant profiles. A multi-agency study of organic and inorganic chemicals in urban stormwater from 50 runoff events at 21 sites across the United States demonst
Authors
Jason R. Masoner, Dana W. Kolpin, Isabelle M. Cozzarelli, Larry B. Barber, D.S. Burden, William T. Foreman, Kenneth J. Forshay, Edward Furlong, Justin F. Groves, Michelle Hladik, Matthew E. Hopton, Jeanne B. Jaeschke, Steffanie H. Keefe, David Krabbenhoft, Richard Lowrance, Kristin Romanok, David L. Rus, William R. Selbig, Brad Williams, Paul Bradley

Global observational needs and resources for marine biodiversity

The diversity of life in the sea is critical to the health of ocean ecosystems that support living resources and therefore essential to the economic, nutritional, recreational, and health needs of billions of people. Yet there is evidence that the biodiversity of many marine habitats is being altered in response to a changing climate and human activity. Understanding this change, and forecasting w
Authors
Gabrielle Canonico, Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Enrique Montes, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Carol Stepien, Dawn J. Wright, Abigail Benson, Brian Helmuth, Mark John Costello, Isabel Sousa-Pinto, Hanieh Saeedi, Jan Newton, Ward Appeltans, Nina Bednaršek, Levente Bodrossy, Benjamin D. Best, Angelika Brandt, Kelly D Goodwin, Katrin Iken, Antonio C Marquez, Patricia Miloslavich, Martin Ostrowski, Woody Turner, Eric P Achterberg, Tom Barry, Omar DeFeo, Gregorio Bigatti, Lea-Anne Henry, Berta Ramiro-Sánchez, Pablo Durán, Telmo Morato, J. Murray Roberts, Ana Garcia-Alegre, Mar Sacau Cuadrado, Bramley Murton

Gap Analysis Project (GAP) Terrestrial Vertebrate Species Richness Maps for the Conterminous U.S.

The mission of the Gap Analysis Project (GAP) is to support national and regional assessments of the conservation status of vertebrate species and plant communities. This report explains conterminous United States species richness maps created by the U.S. Geological Survey for four major classes in the phylum Chordata: mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. In this work, we focus on terrestrial
Authors
Kevin J. Gergely, Kenneth G. Boykin, Alexa McKerrow, Matthew J. Rubino, Nathan M. Tarr, Steven G. Williams

Protected areas lacking for many common fluvial fishes of the conterminous USA

AimTo assess the effectiveness of protected areas in two catchment scales (local and network) in conserving regionally common fluvial fishes using modelled species distributions.LocationConterminous United States.MethodsA total of 150 species were selected that were geographically widespread, abundant, non‐habitat specialists and native within nine large ecoregions. Species distribution models wer
Authors
Arthur R. Cooper, Yin-Phang Tsang, Dana M. Infante, Wesley M. Daniel, Alexa McKerrow, Daniel J. Wieferich

Metabolic rhythms in flowing waters: An approach for classifying river productivity regimes

Although seasonal patterns of ecosystem productivity have been extensively described and analyzed with respect to their primary forcings in terrestrial and marine systems, comparatively little is known about these same processes in rivers. However, it is now possible to perform a large‐scale synthesis on the patterns and drivers of river productivity regimes because of the recent sensor advances a
Authors
Philip Savoy, Emily S. Bernhardt, Alison P. Appling, James B. Heffernan, Edward G. Stets, Jordan S. Read, Judson Harvey

Species occurrence data for the Nation—USGS Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON)

USGS Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) is a unique, Web-based Federal mapping resource for species occurrence data in the United States and its Territories. BISON’s size is unprecedented, including records for most living species found in the United States and encompassing the efforts of more than a million professional and citizen scientists. Most of BISON’s species occurrence r
Authors

Species occurrence data for the nation

USGS Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) is a unique, web-based Federal mapping resource for species occurrence data in the United States and its Territories.BISON’s size is unprecedented, including records for most living species found in the United States and encompassing the efforts of more than a million professional and citizen scientists. Most of BISON’s species occurrence re
Authors

The metabolic regimes of 356 rivers in the United States

A national-scale quantification of metabolic energy flow in streams and rivers can improve understanding of the temporal dynamics of in-stream activity, links between energy cycling and ecosystem services, and the effects of human activities on aquatic metabolism. The two dominant terms in aquatic metabolism, gross primary production (GPP) and aerobic respiration (ER), have recently become practic
Authors
Alison P. Appling, Jordan S. Read, Luke A. Winslow, Maite Arroita, Emily S. Bernhardt, Natalie A. Griffiths, Robert O. Hall, Judson W. Harvey, James B. Heffernan, Emily H. Stanley, Edward G. Stets, Charles B. Yackulic