Publications
The following list of California Water Science Center publications includes both official USGS publications and journal articles authored by our scientists.
Filter Total Items: 1737
Relative bias in catch among long-term fish monitoring surveys within the San Francisco Estuary
Fish monitoring gears rarely capture all available fish, an inherent bias in monitoring programs referred to as catchability. Catchability is a source of bias that can be affected by numerous aspects of gear deployment (e.g., deployment speed, mesh size, and avoidance behavior). Thus, care must be taken when multiple surveys—especially those using different sampling methods—are combined to answer
Authors
Brock Huntsman, Brian Mahardja, Samuel M. Bashevkin
San Francisco Estuary chlorophyll sensor and sample analysis intercomparison
This report presents an assessment of chlorophyll collection methods and anonymous results of field and laboratory comparisons in 2018 - 2019 by agencies in the San Francisco Estuary (SFE). The methods assessment and comparison exercises, with funding provided by the Delta Regional Monitoring Program and Bay Nutrient Management Strategy and in-kind contributions from participating agencies, are a
Authors
Elizabeth B. Stumpner, Jamie S. Yin, Matthew Heberger, Jing Wu, Adam Wong, John Franco Saraceno
Risk-informed levee erosion countermeasure site selection and design in the Sacramento area part 2: Probabilistic numerical simulation of bank erosion
USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper, the second of two parts, addresses processing the collected data to infor
Authors
Todd M. Rivas, Jonathan AuBuchon, Anna Shidlovskaya, Eddy J. Langendoen, Paul A. Work, Daniel N. Livsey, Anna Timchenko, Kellie Jemes, Jean-Louis Briaud
Risk-informed levee erosion countermeasure site selection and design in the Sacramento area part 1: Soil sampling, testing, and data processing
USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper discusses the measurement of the intrinsic erosion and geotechnical proper
Authors
Todd M. Rivas, Jonathan AuBuchon, Anna Shidlovskaya, Eddy J. Langendoen, Paul A. Work, Daniel N. Livsey, Anna Timchenko, Jean-Louis Briaud
Improving groundwater model calibration with repeat microgravity measurements
Groundwater-flow models depend on hydraulic head and flux observations for evaluation and calibration. A different type of observation—change in storage measured using repeat microgravity—can also be used for parameter estimation by simulating the expected change in gravity from a groundwater model and including the observation misfit in the objective function. The method is demonstrated using new
Authors
Jeffrey Kennedy, Libby M. Kahler, Jacob E. Knight, Joshua D. Larson
Ocean connectivity drives trophic support for consumers in an intermittently closed coastal lagoon
Estuarine food webs are complex, as marine, freshwater, and terrestrial inputs combine and contribute variable amounts of organic material. Seasonal fluctuations in precipitation amplify the dynamism inherent to estuarine food webs, particularly in lagoonal estuaries, which can be seasonally closed and disconnected from the ocean in low-runoff periods (bar-built lagoons). Despite their abundance a
Authors
Matthew J. Young, Frederick V. Feyrer, Darren Fong, Rachel C. Johnson, Tamara E. C. Kraus, Veronica Larwood, Elizabeth B. Stumpner, Megan B. Young
A scalable model-independent iterative data assimilation tool for sequential and batch estimation of high dimensional model parameters and states
Ensemble-based data assimilation (DA) methods have displayed strong potential to improve model state and parameter estimation across several disciplines due to their computational efficiency, scalability, and ability to estimate uncertainty in the dynamic states and the parameters. However, a barrier to adoption of ensemble DA methods remains. Namely, there is currently a lack of available tools t
Authors
Ayman H. Alzraiee, Jeremy T. White, Matthew Knowling, Randall J. Hunt, Michael N. Fienen
Juvenile African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) express growth, metamorphosis, mortality, gene expression, and metabolic changes when exposed to thiamethoxam and clothianidin
Neonicotinoids (NEO) represent the main class of insecticides currently in use, with thiamethoxam (THX) and clothianidin (CLO) primarily applied agriculturally. With few comprehensive studies having been performed with non-target amphibians, the aim was to investigate potential biomarker responses along an adverse outcome pathway of NEO exposure, whereby data were collected on multiple biological
Authors
Jill Jenkins, Katherine R. Hartop, Ghadeer Bukhari, Debra E. Howton, Kelly L. Smalling, Scott Mize, Michelle Hladik, Darren Johnson, Rassa Dale, Bonnie L. Brown
Geostatistical mapping of salinity conditioned on borehole logs, Montebello Oil Field, California
We present a geostatistics-based stochastic salinity estimation framework for the Montebello Oil Field that capitalizes on available total dissolved solids (TDS) data from groundwater samples as well as electrical resistivity (ER) data from borehole logging. Data from TDS samples (n = 4924) was coded into an indicator framework based on falling below four selected thresholds (500, 1000, 3000, and
Authors
Neil Terry, Frederick Day-Lewis, Matthew K. Landon, Michael Land, Jennifer S. Stanton, John W. Lane
Dispersion and stratification dynamics in the upper Sacramento River deep water ship channel
Hydrodynamics control the movement of water and material within and among habitats, where time-scales of mixing can exert bottom-up regulatory effects on aquatic ecosystems through their influence on primary production. The San Francisco Estuary (estuary) is a low-productivity ecosystem, which is in part responsible for constraining higher trophic levels, including fishes. Many research and habita
Authors
Leah Lenoch, Paul Stumpner, Jon R. Burau, Luke C. Loken, Steven Sadro
The silence of the clams: Forestry registered pesticides as multiple stressors on soft-shell clams
Contaminants are ubiquitous in the environment, often reaching aquatic systems. Combinations of forestry use pesticides have been detected in both water and aquatic organism tissue samples in coastal systems. Yet, most toxicological studies focus on the effects of these pesticides individually, at high doses, and over acute time periods, which, while key for establishing toxicity and safe limits,
Authors
Alexandra G. Tissot, Elise F. Granek, Anne W Thompson, Michelle Hladik, Patrick W. Moran, Kaegen Scully-Engelmeyer
The triple argon isotope composition of groundwater on ten-thousand-year timescales
Understanding the age and movement of groundwater is important for predicting the vulnerability of wells to contamination, constraining flow models that inform sustainable groundwater management, and interpreting geochemical signals that reflect past climate. Due to both the ubiquity of groundwater with order ten-thousand-year residence times and its importance for climate reconstruction of the la
Authors
Alan Seltzer, John A. Krantz, Jessica Ng, Wesley R. Danskin, David Bekaert, Peter H. Barry, David L. Kimbrough, Justin T. Kulongoski, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus