Publications
This list of publications includes peer-review journal articles, official USGS publications series, reports and more authored by scientists in the Ecosystems Mission Area. A database of all USGS publications, with advanced search features, can be accessed at the USGS Publications Warehouse.
Filter Total Items: 41902
Diet and bathymetric distribution of juvenile Lake Trout Salvelinus namaycush in Lake Huron
Rehabilitation efforts for Lake Trout Salvelinus namaycush in Lake Huron have resulted in increased capture of young wild Lake Trout in annual bottom trawl surveys conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey. To better understand the ecology of juvenile (
Authors
Edward F. Roseman, Stephen Riley, Taaja Tucker, Steve A. Farha, Scott Jackson, Dustin Bowser
Upper Colorado River Basin 20th century droughts under 21st century warming: Plausible scenarios for the future
This study builds on a collaboration with a water resource management community of practice in the Upper Colorado River Basin to develop scenarios of future drought and assess impacts on water supply reliability. Water managers are concerned with the impacts of warming on water year streamflow, but uncertainties in projections of climate make the application of these projections to planning a chal
Authors
Connie A. Woodhouse, Rebecca M. Smith, Stephanie A. McAfee, Gregory T. Pederson, Gregory J. McCabe, W. Paul Miller, Adam Csank
Assessing contributions of cold-water refuges to reproductive migration corridor conditions for adult salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia River, USA
Diadromous fish populations face multiple challenges along their migratory routes. These challenges include suboptimal water quality, harvest, and barriers to longitudinal and lateral connectivity. Interactions among factors influencing migration success make it challenging to assess management options for improving migratory fish conditions along riverine migration corridors. We describe a spatia
Authors
Marcía N. Snyder, Nathan H. Schumaker, Jason B. Dunham, Matthew Keefer, Peter Leinenbach, Allen Brookes, John Palmer, Jennifer Wu, Druscilla M Keenan, Joseph L. Ebersole
Water storage decisions will determine the distribution and persistence of imperiled river fishes
Managing the world’s freshwater supply to meet societal and environmental needs in a changing climate is one of the biggest challenges for the 21st century. Dams provide water security, however, the allocation of dwindling water supply among reservoirs could exacerbate or ameliorate the effects of climate change on aquatic communities. Here, we show that the relative sensitivity of river thermal r
Authors
Kimberly L. Dibble, Charles Yackulic, Theodore Kennedy, Kevin R. Bestgen, John C. Schmidt
Stony coral tissue loss disease in Florida is associated with disruption of host–zooxanthellae physiology
Samples from eight species of corals (Colpophyllia natans, Dendrogyra cylindrus, Diploria labyrinthiformis, Meandrina meandrites, Montastraea cavernosa, Orbicella faveolata, Pseudodiploria strigosa, and Siderastrea siderea) that exhibited gross clinical signs of acute, subacute, or chronic tissue loss attributed to stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) were collected from the Florida Reef Tract
Authors
Jan Landsberg, Yasu Kiryu, Esther Peters, Patrick Wilson, Yvonne Waters, Kerry Maxwell, Lindsay Huebner, Thierry M. Work
Evidence of post-breeding prospecting in a long-distance migrant.
Organisms assess biotic and abiotic cues at multiple sites when deciding where to settle. However, due to temporal constraints on this prospecting, the suitability of available habitat may be difficult for an individual to assess when cues are most reliable, or at the time they are making settlement decisions. For migratory birds, the postbreeding season may be the optimal time to prospect and inf
Authors
Max Ciaglo, Ross Calhoun, Scott W Yanco, Michael B. Wunder, Craig A. Stricker, Brian D Linkhart
Self-limitation of sand storage in a bedrock-canyon river arising from the interaction of flow and grain size
Bedrock-canyon rivers tend to be supply limited because they are efficient transporters of sediment and not because the upstream supply of sediment is small. A byproduct of this supply limitation is that the finer alluvium stored in these rivers has shorter residence times and smaller volumes than in alluvial rivers. To improve our understanding of disequilibrium sediment transport and its effect
Authors
David Topping, Paul Grams, Ronald E. Griffiths, David Dean, Scott Wright, Joel A. Unema
Effects of postfire climate and seed availability on postfire conifer regeneration
Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform p
Authors
Joseph A E Stewart, Phillip J. van Mantgem, Derek J N Young, Kristen L. Shive, Haiganoush K. Preisler, Adrian Das, Nathan L. Stephenson, Jon Keeley, Hugh D. Safford, Micah C. Wright, Kevin R Welch, James H. Thorne
Environmental contamination and unusual snake mortality in an urban national wildlife refuge
The National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) System protects ~150 million acres of land and water in the United States and provides habitat for >2,000 native vertebrates species. Although legally protected, wildlife populations within these refuges can be threatened by anthropogenic activities. The lack of knowledge about such threats has the potential to undermine biodiversity conservation.
We investigate
Authors
Kimberly A. Terrell, Anne Ballmann, Ashli Brown, Christina Childers, Susan Knowles, Ashley Meredith, Darrell Sparks
Ecological interfaces between land and flowing water: Themes and trends in riparian research and management
This paper provides an overview of past, present and future themes for research and management of riparian zones, often relating to papers within this Wetlands Special Feature. Riparian research expanded in the United States around 1980 with themes that recognized (1) damage from excessive livestock, or (2) damage from river damming and diversion, and (3) the beneficial capacity of riparian buffer
Authors
Stewart B. Rood, Michael L. Scott, Mark Dixon, Eduardo Gonzalez, Christian O Marks, Patrick B. Shafroth, Martin Volk
Behavioral responses across a mosaic of ecosystem states restructure a sea otter–urchin trophic cascade
Consumer and predator foraging behavior can impart profound trait-mediated constraints on community regulation that scale up to influence the structure and stability of ecosystems. Here, we demonstrate how the behavioral response of an apex predator to changes in prey behavior and condition can dramatically alter the role and relative contribution of top-down forcing, depending on the spatial orga
Authors
Joshua G Smith, Joseph A. Tomoleoni, Michelle M. Staedler, Sophia Lyon, Jessica Fujii, M. Tim Tinker
Density dependence and adult survival drive the dynamics in two high elevation amphibian populations
Amphibian conservation has progressed from the identification of declines to mitigation, but efforts are hampered by the lack of nuanced information about the effects of environmental characteristics and stressors on mechanistic processes of population regulation. Challenges include a paucity of long-term data and scant information about the relative roles of extrinsic (e.g., weather) and intrinsi
Authors
Amanda M. Kissel, Simone Tenan, Erin L. Muths