WARC SSP Goal 3

The Conasauga River in northwest Georgia and southeast Tennessee harbors the majority of mussel diversity still found in the Georgia portion of the Upper Coosa Basin. While the Conasauga historically supported at least 44 mussel species, only about 20 species remain.

Extreme drought and temperature in the southeastern United States may become more frequent in the future, and any extreme shifts in climate condition are likely to have effects on wetland ecosystem function. USGS research predicts the effects of climate change by shifts in function and biodiversity across existing climate gradients in baldcypress swamps.

USGS aims to integrate biological and hydrological models to help develop management tools to deal with the projected ecological consequences of rising sea level in coastal south Florida.

The 2011 (Draft) Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on Migratory Bird Hunting (EIS) offers four alternatives concerning the timing of the regulatory process for setting waterfowl hunting seasons. The no-change alternative involves a process by which most proposals for hunting seasons are developed in response to survey information that becomes available in early summer, such as breeding...

Quality photographs of plant species are rare on the internet, often difficult to find, and are generally copyrighted, preventing them from being used by government agencies and non-government organizations, academics and the general public.

Deep-sea coral habitats are complex ecosystems at the landscape and local level. While these systems may harbor substantial levels of biodiversity, they remain inadequately investigated.

Wetland restoration and creation efforts are increasingly proposed as means to compensate for wetland losses. To address the need for evaluating the development of ecosystem structure and function in restored and created wetlands, USGS compared created tidal wetlands sites to natural mangrove wetlands in Tampa Bay, Florida.

WaterSMART (Sustain and Manage America’s Resources for Tomorrow) is a program of the Department of the Interior that focuses on improving water conservation and helping water-resource managers make sound decisions about water use.

Hydrologic restoration is one of several approaches to rehabilitate mangroves on a large-scale. USGS evaluates how solely restoring tidal hydrologic flows affect the recovery of mangroves in Florida.

Wetlands have the potential to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide via photosynthesis, and flooded soils have low oxygen levels which decrease rates of decomposition to promote the retention of soil carbon. However, the type of greenhouse gases emitted from wetlands varies by wetland type and soil condition. A suite of approaches are being used to assess fluxes of greenhouses gases, like...

USGS investigates the eco-physiological responses of coastal forested wetland vegetation to envrionmental stressors, and what role vegetation may have in affecting local hydrological cycling as a result of these stressors.

USGS uses weather surveillance radar data and landscape-scale habitat metrics to model bird-habitat connections along the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico.