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Spatial extent of forested avalanche terrain impacted by wildfire across the Sawtooth National Forest
Forest structure is a major driver of mountain snowpacks and avalanche occurrence. Healthy forests can reduce the incidence of dangerous slab avalanches, slow avalanches when in motion, shorten their runout distances, and act as a safety buffer for backcountry users, infrastructure, and transportation corridors. Since 1984, wildfire area in the seasonal snow zone of the western United States has i
Authors
Zachary Miller, John Sykes, Megan Guinn, Benjamin VandenBos, Scott Savage, Erich Peitzsch
Big avalanches in a changing climate: Using tree-ring derived avalanche chronologies to examine avalanche frequency across multiple climate types
Large-magnitude snow avalanches pose a hazard to humans and infrastructure worldwide. Analyzing the spatiotemporal behavior of avalanches and the contributory climate factors is important for understanding historical variability in climate-avalanche relationships as well as improving avalanche forecasting. This study uses established dendrochronological methods to develop long-term regional avalan
Authors
Erich Peitzsch, Gregory T. Pederson, Justin Martin, Eran Hood, Ethan Greene, Karl Birkeland, Kelly Elder, Gabriel Wolken, Nickolas E. Kichas, Daniel Kent Stahle, John Harley
Using tree rings to compare Colorado’s 2019 avalanche cycle to previous large avalanche cycles
Large magnitude avalanches (size ≥D3) impact settlements, transportation corridors, and public safety worldwide. In Colorado, United States, avalanches have killed more people than any other natural hazard since 1950. In March 2019, a historically large magnitude avalanche cycle occurred throughout the entire mountainous portion of Colorado resulting in more than 1000 reported avalanches during a
Authors
Erich Peitzsch, Ethan Greene, Jason Konigsberg, Gregory T. Pederson, Justin Martin, Nickolas Kichas, Daniel Kent Stahle, Adrien Favillier, Nicolas Eckert, Karl Birkeland, Kelly Elder
Analyzing spatial distributions and alignments of pitted cone features in Utopia Planitia on Mars
Martian geomorphology and surface features provide links to understanding past geologic processes such as fluid movement, local and regional tectonics, and feature formation mechanisms. Pitted cones are common features in the northern plains basins of Mars. They have been proposed to have formed from upwelling volatile-rich fluids, such as magma or water-sediment slurries. In this study, we map th
Authors
Mackenzie M. Mills, Alfred S. McEwen, Amanda N. Hughes, Ji-Eun Kim, Chris Okubo
Compost, plants and endophytes versus metal contamination: Choice of a restoration strategy steers the microbiome in polymetallic mine waste
Finding solutions for the remediation and restoration of abandoned mining areas is of great environmental importance as they pose a risk to ecosystem health. In this study, our aim was to determine how remediation strategies with (i) compost amendment, (ii) planting a metal-tolerant grass Bouteloua curtipendula, and (iii) its inoculation with beneficial endophytes influenced the microbiome of meta
Authors
Martina Kracmarova, Jakub Papik, Ondrej Uhlik, John Freeman, Andrea L. Foster, Mary-Catherine Leewis, Courtney Creamer
Scenario-Based Decision Analysis: Integrated scenario planning and structured decision making for resource management under climate change
Managing resources under climate change is a high-stakes and daunting task, especially because climate change and associated complex biophysical responses engender sustained directional changes as well as abrupt transformations. This environmental non-stationarity challenges assumptions and expectations among scientists, managers, rights holders, and stakeholders. These challenges are anything but
Authors
Brian W. Miller, Mitchell Eaton, Amy Symstad, Gregor W. Schuurman, Imtiaz Rangwala, William R. Travis
A novel approach to assessing natural resource injury with Bayesian networks
Quantifying the effects of environmental stressors on natural resources is problematic because of complex interactions among environmental factors that influence endpoints of interest. This complexity, coupled with data limitations, propagates uncertainty that can make it difficult to causally associate specific environmental stressors with injury endpoints. The Natural Resource Damage Assessment
Authors
Freya Elizabeth Rowland, Christopher James Kotalik, Bruce G. Marcot, Jo Ellen Hinck, David Walters
Long-term changes in concentrations and yield of riverine dissolved silicon from the poles to the tropics
Riverine exports of silicon (Si) influence global carbon cycling through the growth of marine diatoms, which account for ∼25% of global primary production. Climate change will likely alter river Si exports in biome-specific ways due to interacting shifts in chemical weathering rates, hydrologic connectivity, and metabolic processes in aquatic and terrestrial systems. Nonetheless, factors driving l
Authors
Kathi Jo Jankowski, Keira Johnson, Lienne R. Sethna, Paul Julian, Adam S. Wymore, Arial J. Shogren, Patrick Thomas, Pamela L. Sullivan, Diane M. McKnight, William H. McDowell, Ruth C. Heindel, Jeremy B. Jones, Wilfred M. Wollheim, Benjamin Abbott, Linda A. Deegan, Joanna C. Carey
High-frequency variability of carbon dioxide fluxes in tidal water over a temperate salt marsh
Existing analyses of salt marsh carbon budgets rarely quantify carbon loss as CO2 through the air–water interface in inundated marshes. This study estimates the variability of partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) and air–water CO2 fluxes over summer and fall of 2014 and 2015 using high-frequency measurements of tidal water pCO2 in a salt marsh of the U.S. northeast region. Monthly mean CO2 effluxes vari
Authors
Shuzhen Song, Zhaohui Aleck Wang, Kevin D. Kroeger, Meagan J. Eagle, Sophie N. Chu, Jianzhong Ge
Bathymetric contour maps, surface area and capacity tables, and bathymetric change maps for selected water-supply lakes in northeastern Missouri, 2021
Bathymetric data were collected at 12 water-supply lakes in northeastern Missouri by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (MoDNR) and various local agencies, as part of a multiyear effort to establish or update the surface area and capacity tables for the surveyed lakes. The lakes were surveyed in March through May 2021. Ten of the lake
Authors
Benjamin C. Rivers, Richard J. Huizinga, Joseph M. Richards, Garett J. Waite
Mapping methane reduction potential of tidal wetland restoration in the United States
Coastal wetlands can emit excess methane in cases where they are impounded and artificially freshened by structures that impede tidal exchange. We provide a new assessment of coastal methane reduction opportunities for the contiguous United States by combining multiple publicly available map layers, reassessing greenhouse gas emissions datasets, and applying scenarios informed by geospatial inform
Authors
James Holmquist, Meagan J. Eagle, Rebecca Molinari, Sydney K. Nick, Liana Stachowicz, Kevin D. Kroeger
Long-term trends in Arctic riverine chemistry signal multi-faceted northern change
Rivers integrate processes occurring throughout their watersheds and are therefore sentinels of change across broad spatial scales. River chemistry also regulates ecosystem function across Earth’s land–ocean continuum, exerting control from the micro- (for example, local food web) to the macro- (for example, global carbon cycle) scale. In the rapidly warming Arctic, a wide range of processes—from
Authors
Suzanne E. Tank, James W. McClelland, Robert G. M. Spencer, Alexander I. Shiklomanov, Anya Suslova, Florentina Moatar, Rainer Amon, Lee W. Cooper, Greg Elias, Vyacheslav Gordeev, Christopher Guay, Tatiana Gurtovaya, Lyudmila Kosmenko, Edda A. Mutter, Bruce Peterson, Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink, Peter Raymond, Paul Schuster, Lindsay Scott, Robin Staples, Robert G. Striegl, Mikhail Tretiakov, Alexander V. Zhulidov, Nikita Zimov, Sergey Zimov, Robert M. Holmes