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Filter Total Items: 171122

Reanalysis indicates little evidence of reduction in eagle mortality rate by automated curtailment of wind turbines

Unintended consequences of renewable energy development include collision-caused deaths of birds and bats. Energy companies may risk prosecution if protected species are among the casualties. Shutting down turbines during high collision-risk conditions could reduce mortality rates, and several companies are developing systems to identify such conditions.A recent peer-reviewed article published in
Authors
Manuela Huso, Daniel Dalthorp

Roles of regional structures and country-rock facies in defining mineral belts in central Idaho mineral province with detail for Yellow Pine and Thunder Mountain mining districts

The central Idaho metallogenic province hosts numerous mineral deposit types. These include Late Cretaceous precious-polymetallic vein deposits, amagmatic Paleocene–Eocene breccia-hosted gold-tungsten-antimony deposits, and Eocene mercury deposits in metasedimentary roof pendants and in Late Cretaceous granitoids. Hot-springs gold deposits in Eocene volcanic rocks are also included in the central
Authors
Karen Lund, John N. Aleinikoff, Christopher Holm-Denoma

Improvements and evaluation of the agro-hydrologic VegET model for large-area water budget analysis and drought monitoring

We enhanced the agro-hydrologic VegET model to include snow accumulation and melt processes and the separation of runoff into surface runoff and deep drainage. Driven by global weather datasets and parameterized by land surface phenology (LSP), the enhanced VegET model was implemented in the cloud to simulate daily soil moisture (SM), actual evapotranspiration (ETa), and runoff (R) for the conterm
Authors
Gabriel B. Senay, Stefanie Kagone, Gabriel Edwin Lee Parrish, Kul Bikram Khand, Olena Boiko, Naga Manohar Velpuri

Methane pore accessibility, densification, and accommodation by organic matter in the Niobrara Formation at wet-gas thermal maturity conditions

Petroleum within unconventional source-rock reservoirs is hosted in organic matter and mineral pore space as well as in voids and microfractures. Recent work has shown that for source-rock reservoirs in the dry gas window, significant portions of methane (CH4), the main component of petroleum at elevated maturities, can be stored within fine (<5 nm) organic matter porosity. However, within reservo
Authors
Aaron M. Jubb, Leslie F. Ruppert, Tristan G. A. Youngs, Tom Headen, Justin E. Birdwell, Michael Cheshire, Martha (Rebecca) Stokes

Exploring the interior of Europa with the Europa Clipper

The Galileo mission to Jupiter revealed that Europa is an ocean world. The Galileo magnetometer experiment in particular provided strong evidence for a salty subsurface ocean beneath the ice shell, likely in contact with the rocky core. Within the ice shell and ocean, a number of tectonic and geodynamic processes may operate today or have operated at some point in the past, including solid ice con
Authors
James Roberts, William B. McKinnon, Catherine Elder, Gabriel Tobie, John Biersteker, Duncan Young, Ryan S. Park, Gregor Steinbrügge, Francis Nimmo, Samuel Howell, Julie C. Castillo-Rogez, Morgan Cable, Jacob Abrahams, Michael T. Bland, Chase Chivers, Corey Cochrane, Andrew Dombard, Carolyn M. Ernst, Antonio Genova, Christopher Gerekos, Christopher R. Glein, Camilla Harris, Hamish Hay, Paul O. Hayne, Matthew Hedman, Hauke Hussmann, Xianzhe Jia, Krishan Khurana, Walter Kiefer, Randolph L. Kirk, Margaret Kivelson, Justin D. Lawrence, Erin J. Leonard, Jonathan Lunine, Erwan Mazarico, Thomas B. McCord, Alfred S. McEwen, Carol Paty, Lynnae Quick, Carol A. Raymond, Kurt Retherford, Lorenz Roth, Abigail Rymer, Joachim Saur, Kirk Scanlan, Dustin Schroeder, David Senske, Wencheng Shao, Krista Soderlund, Elizabeth Spiers, Marshall Styczinski, Paolo Tortora, Steven Vance, Michaela Villarreal, Benjamin Weiss, Joseph Westlake, Paul Withers, Natalie Wolfenbarger, Bonnie J. Buratti, Haje Korth, Robert Pappalardo, Interior Thematic Working Group

Macroscale analyses suggest invasive plant impacts depend more on the composition of invading plants than on environmental context

AimNative biodiversity is threatened by the spread of non-native invasive species. Many studies demonstrate that invasions reduce local biodiversity but we lack an understanding of how impacts vary across environments at the macroscale. Using ~11,500 vegetation surveys from ecosystems across the United States, we quantified how the relationship between non-native plant cover and native plant diver
Authors
Evelyn M. Beaury, Helen Sofaer, Regan Early, Ian Pearse, Dana M. Blumenthal, Jeffrey Corbin, Jeffrey M. Diez, Jeffrey Dukes, David Barnett, Ines Ibanez, Laís Petri, Montserrat Vilà, Bethany A. Bradley

Potential economic consequences along migratory flyways from reductions in breeding habitat of migratory waterbirds

The migration of species, often across continents, makes it difficult to quantify the cumulative effects of local- and regional-scale conservation actions. Further, variation in stakeholder interests, differing jurisdictional governance processes, priorities, and monitoring abilities across the migratory range shapes place-specific differences in management actions. These differences may lead mana
Authors
Wayne E. Thogmartin, James H. Devries, Darius J. Semmens, James E. Diffendorfer, James A. Dubovksy, Jonathan J. Derbridge, Brady J. Mattsson

Assessing contaminants of emerging concern in the Great Lakes Ecosystem: A decade of method development and practical application

Assessing the ecological risk of contaminants in the field typically involves consideration of a complex mixture of compounds which may or may not be detected via instrumental analyses. Further, there are insufficient data to predict the potential biological effects of many detected compounds, leading to their being characterized as contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). Over the past several ye
Authors
Gerald T. Ankley, Steven R. Corsi, Christine M. Custer, Drew R. Ekman, Stephanie L. Hummel, Kimani L. Kimbrough, Heiko L. Schoenfuss, Daniel L. Villeneuve

Earth’s mantle composition revealed by mantle plumes

Mantle plumes originate at depths near the core−mantle boundary (~2,800 km). As such, they provide invaluable information about the composition of the deep mantle and insight into convection, crustal formation, and crustal recycling, as well as global heat and volatile budgets. In this Review, we discuss the effectiveness and challenges of using isotopic analyses of plume-generated rocks to infer
Authors
Dominique Weis, Karen Harpp, Lauren N Harrison, Maud Boyet, Catherine Chauvel, Cinzia Farnetani, Val Finlayson, Kanai Lee, Rita Paraï, Anat Shahar, Nicole Williamson

Benefits and cautions in data assimilation strategies: An example of modeling groundwater recharge

Assimilating recent observations improves model outcomes for real-time assessments of groundwater processes. This is demonstrated in estimating time-varying recharge to a shallow fractured-rock aquifer in response to precipitation. Results from estimating the time-varying water-table altitude (h) and recharge, and their error covariances, are compared for forecasting, filtering, and fixed-lag smoo
Authors
Allen M. Shapiro, Frederick Day-Lewis

Carbon sequestration and subsidence reversal in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Bay: Management opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation

The aquatic landscapes of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta (hereafter, the Delta) and Suisun Bay represent both a significant past and future soil carbon stock. Historical alterations of hydrologic flows have led to depletion of soil carbon stocks via emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), and loss of elevation as a result of subsidence. Optimizing ecosystem hydrology in the Delta and Suisun Bay could
Authors
Lisamarie Windham-Myers, Patty Oikawa, Steve Deverel, Dylan Chapple, Judith Z. Drexler, Dylan Stern

CGS: Coupled growth and survival model with cohort fairness

Fish modeling in complex environments is critical for understanding drivers of population dynamics in aquatic systems. This paper proposes a Bayesian network method for modeling fish survival and growth over multiple connected rivers. Traditional fish survival models capture the effect of multiple environmental drivers (e.g., stream temperature, stream flow) by adding different variables, which in
Authors
Erhu He, Yue Wan, Benjamin Letcher, Jennifer Burlingame Hoyle Fair, Yiquin Xie, Xiaowei Jia