Book Chapters
Science Quality and Integrity
The USGS provides unbiased, objective, and impartial scientific information upon which our audiences, including resource managers, planners, and other entities, rely.
The USGS provides unbiased, objective, and impartial scientific information upon which our audiences, including resource managers, planners, and other entities, rely.
Browse more than 5,500 book chapters authored by our scientists over the past 100+ year history of the USGS and refine search by topic, location, year, and advanced search.
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Water resources in the desert southwest
As the old saying goes, there is nothing more precious than water in the desert. The Ancestral Puebloans, Hohokam, and other pre-Columbian cultures knew this and built their civilizations near guaranteed water supplies. When the Spaniards arrived in present-day Arizona, they found that the Tohono O’odham and Piman cultures had settled in prime riverine sites, turning perennial flow through lush ri
Authors
Robert H. Webb, Stanley A. Leake
Structural equation modeling and the analysis of long-term monitoring data
The analysis of long-term monitoring data is increasingly important; not only for the discovery and documentation of changes in environmental systems, but also as an enterprise whose fruits validate the allocation of effort and scarce funds to monitoring. In simple terms, we may distinguish between the detection of change in some ecosystem attribute versus the investigation of causes and consequen
Authors
James B. Grace, Jon E. Keeley, Darren Johnson, A Bollen
Impacts of climate change on ecosystem services
Key Findings By 2050, climate change will triple the fraction of counties in the U.S. that are at high or extremely high risk of outstripping their water supplies (from 10 percent to 32 percent). The most at risk areas in the U.S. are the West, Southwest and Great Plains regions. Regulation of drinking water quality will be strained as high rainfall and river discharge conditions may lead to highe
Authors
Peter Kareiva, Mary Ruckleshaus, Katie Arkema, Gary Geller, Evan Girvetz, Dave Goodrich, Erik Nelson, Virginia Matzek, Malin Pinsky, Walt Reid, Martin Saunders, Darius J. Semmens, Heather Tallis
Corals are the building blocks of reefs
No abstract available.
Authors
Steven L. Miller, Eugene A. Shinn, Barbara H. Lidz
A Bayesian method to rank different model forecasts of the same volcanic ash cloud: Chapter 24
Volcanic eruptions often spew fine ash high into the atmosphere, where it is carried downwind, forming long ash clouds that disrupt air traffic and pose a hazard to air travel. To mitigate such hazards, the community studying ash hazards must assess risk of ash ingestion for any flight path and provide robust and accurate forecasts of volcanic ash dispersal. We provide a quantitative and objective
Authors
Roger P. Denlinger, P. Webley, Larry G. Mastin, Hans F. Schwaiger
Digital elevation model generation from satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar: Chapter 5
An accurate digital elevation model (DEM) is a critical data set for characterizing the natural landscape, monitoring natural hazards, and georeferencing satellite imagery. The ideal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) configuration for DEM production is a single-pass two-antenna system. Repeat-pass single-antenna satellite InSAR imagery, however, also can be used to produce useful D
Authors
Zhong Lu, Daniel Dzurisin, Hyung-Sup Jung, Lei Zhang, Wonjin Lee, Chang-Wook Lee
Distributional changes of American martens and fishers in eastern North America, 1699-2001: Chapter 4
Contractions in the geographic distributions of the American marten ( Martes americana) and fi sher ( M. pennanti) in eastern North America south of the St. Lawrence River between Colonial times (ca. 1650–1800) and the fi sher’s recent range expansion (ca. 1930–present) are well documented, but causal factors in these range contractions have only partially been studied. Traditional explanations fo
Authors
William B. Krohn
Dzhezkazgan and associated sandstone copper deposits of the Chu-Sarysu basin, Central Kazakhstan
Sandstone-hosted copper (sandstone Cu) deposits occur within a 200-km reach of the northern Chu-Sarysu basin of central Kazakhstan (Dzhezkazgan and Zhaman-Aibat deposits, and the Zhilandy group of deposits). The deposits consist of Cu sulfide minerals as intergranular cement and grain replacement in 10 ore-bearing members of sandstone and conglomerate within a 600- to 1,000-m thick Pennsylvanian f
Authors
Stephen E. Box, Reimar Seltmann, Michael L. Zientek, Boris Syusyura, Robert A. Creaser, Alla Dolgopolova
Ecological impacts of non-native species
Non-native species are considered one of the greatest threats to freshwater biodiversity worldwide (Drake et al. 1989; Allen and Flecker 1993; Dudgeon et al. 2005). Some of the first hypotheses proposed to explain global patterns of amphibian declines included the effects of non-native species (Barinaga 1990; Blaustein and Wake 1990; Wake and Morowitz 1991). Evidence for the impact of non-native s
Authors
David S. Pilliod, R.A. Griffiths, S.L. Kuzmin
Loss and modification of habitat
Amphibians live in a wide variety of habitats around the world, many of which have been modified or destroyed by human activities. Most species have unique life history characteristics adapted to specific climates, habitats (e.g., lentic, lotic, terrestrial, arboreal, fossorial, amphibious), and local conditions that provide suitable areas for reproduction, development and growth, shelter from env
Authors
Francis Lemckert, Stephen Hecnar, David S. Pilliod
Thermal infrared remote sensing of water temperature in riverine landscapes
Water temperature in riverine landscapes is an important regional indicator of water quality that is influenced by both ground- and surface-water inputs, and indirectly by land use in the surrounding watershed (Brown and Krygier, 1970; Beschta et al., 1987; Chen et al., 1998; Poole and Berman, 2001). Coldwater fishes such as salmon and trout are sensitive to elevated water temperature; therefore,
Authors
R. N Handcock, Christian E. Torgersen, K. A Cherkauer, A. R Gillespie, K Tockner, R. N. Faux, Jing Tan