Publications

Commercial pesticide applicators, farmers, and homeowners apply about 1 billion pounds of pesticides annually to agricultural land, non-crop land, and urban areas throughout the United States (Gilliom and others, 2006, p. 1). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) defines a pesticide as any substance used to kill or control insects, weeds, plant diseases, and other pest organisms. Althou

To better understand how proposed large-scale water withdrawals in Snake Valley may affect the water resources and hydrologic processes in the Great Basin National Park, the National Park Service needs to have a better understanding of the relations between streamflow and groundwater flow through alluvium and karst topography of the Pole Canyon Limestone. Information that is critical to understand

The Walker River is the main source of inflow to Walker Lake, a closed-basin lake in west-central Nevada. The only outflow from Walker Lake is evaporation from the lake surface. Between 1882 and 2008, upstream agricultural diversions resulted in a lake-level decline of more than 150 feet and storage loss of 7,400,000 acre-feet. Evaporative concentration increased dissolved solids from 2,500 to 17,

The Walker River is the main source of inflow to Walker Lake, a closed-basin lake in west-central Nevada. Between 1882 and 2008, agricultural diversions resulted in a lake-level decline of more than 150 feet and storage loss of 7,400,000 acre-ft. Evaporative concentration increased dissolved solids from 2,500 to 17,000 milligrams per liter. The increase in salinity threatens the survival of the La

The Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) discharges more than 6 million tons of dissolved solids annually, about 40 to 45 percent of which are attributed to agricultural activities. The U.S. Department of the Interior estimates economic damages related to salinity in excess of $330 million annually in the Colorado River Basin. Salinity in the UCRB, as measured by dissolved-solids load and concentrati

Evapotranspiration is the ultimate path of outflow of nearly all water from the Lower Walker River basin. Walker Lake is the terminus of the topographically closed Walker River basin, and the lake level has been declining at an average rate of about 1.6 feet per year (ft/yr) since 1917. As a result of the declining lake level, dissolved-solids concentrations are increasingly threatening the fisher

Cave Springs supply the water for the Lehman Caves Visitor Center at Great Basin National Park, which is about 60 miles east of Ely, Nevada, in White Pine County. The source of water to the springs was investigated to evaluate the potential depletion caused by ground-water pumping in areas east of the park and to consider means to protect the supply from contamination. Cave Springs are a collectio

Some reaches of Clear Creek above U.S. Highway 395 have experienced severe erosion as a result of fires, extreme precipitation events, and past and current human activities in the basin. Previous evaluations of erosion in the basin have concluded that most of the sediment produced and transported in the basin was associated with U.S. Highway 50, a four-lane highway that roughly parallels Clear Cre

The upper Humboldt River basin encompasses 4,364 square miles in northeastern Nevada, and it comprises the headwaters area of the Humboldt River. Nearly all flow of the river originates in this area. The upper Humboldt River basin consists of several structural basins, in places greater than 5,000 feet deep, in which basin-fill deposits of Tertiary and Quaternary age and volcanic rocks of Tertiary

In hydrologic studies, especially those using dynamic unsaturated zone moisture modeling, calculations based on property transfer models informed by hydraulic property databases are often used in lieu of measured data from the site of interest. Reliance on database-informed predicted values has become increasingly common with the use of neural networks. High-quality data are needed for databases u

Unsaturated zone salt reservoirs are potentially mobilized by increased groundwater recharge as semiarid lands are cultivated. This study explores the amounts of pore water sulfate and fluoride relative to chloride in unsaturated zone profiles, evaluates their sources, estimates mobilization due to past land use change, and assesses the impacts on groundwater quality. Inventories of water‐extracta

The design, construction, and performance analyses of a 6.1ha evapotranspiration (ET) landfill cover at the semiarid U.S. Army Fort Carson site, near Colorado Springs, Colo. are presented. Initial water-balance model simulations, using literature reported soil hydraulic data, aided selection of borrow-source soil type(s) that resulted in predictions of negligible annual drainage (⩽1mm∕year). Final