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.
Filter Total Items: 6071
Assessing rangeland health under climate variability and change
RANGELAND HEALTH IN A CHANGING WORLD Rangeland health is an integrated metric that describes a complex suite of ecosystem properties and processes as applied to resource management. While the concept of “healthy” landscapes has a long history, the term “rangeland health” was codified in the US in 1994 as part of an effort to move towards a national, data driven, rangeland condition assessment (Nat
Authors
John B. Bradford, Michael C. Duniway, Seth M. Munson
A revised continuous surface elevation model for modeling
A digital elevation model (DEM) is an essential component of any hydrodynamic model. The Delta Modeling Section (Section) has maintained a database of bathymetry soundings and levee surveys for decades and published a 10-meter (10m) DEM for the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta) (California Department of Water Resources 2012). In collaboration with the U.S. Geological Surve
Authors
Rueen-Fang Wang, Eli Ateljevich, Theresa A. Fregoso, Bruce E. Jaffe
Understanding the central Great Plains as a coupled climatic-hydrological-human system: Lessons learned in operationalizing interdisciplinary collaboration
This chapter discusses an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project to understand the interactions of agriculture, climate, and water resources in the Central Great Plains as a coupled natural-human system. We focus on the Smoky Hills Watershed in Kansas, where we gathered socioeconomic, hydrological, and climatic data, along with ecological data on fish species. The project involved substan
Authors
Marcellus M. Caldas, Martha E. Mather, Jason S. Bergtold, Melinda Daniels, Gabriel Granco, Joseph Aistrup, David A. Haukos, Aleksey Y. Sheshukov, Matthew R. Sanderson, Jessica L. Heier Stamm
Lotic freshwater: Rivers
Ecosystems associated with rivers are intricately connected to their entire watershed. The river ecosystem includes the channel of active water flow, floodplain, and riparian and hyporheic zones. This ecosystem is shaped by interactions among the natural flow of water, sediments within the river and entering the river, and large wood regimes within the riparian zone. River integrity describes the
Authors
Ellen Wohl, R. O. Hall, David Walters
Wildlife mortality at wind facilities: How we know what we know how we might mislead ourselves, and how we set our future course
To accurately estimate per turbine – or per megawatt – annual wildlife mortality at wind facilities, the raw counts of carcasses found must be adjusted for four major sources of imperfect detection: (1) fatalities that occur outside the monitoring period; (2) carcasses that land outside the monitored area; (3) carcasses that are removed by scavengers or deteriorate beyond recognition prior to dete
Authors
Manuela M. Huso
Agricultural chemical concentrations and loads in rivers draining the Central Valley, California: Before, during, and after an extended drought
Drought or near drought conditions persisted in California from 2012 through 2016, followed by a high precipitation year in 2017. Long-term water quality monitoring of two key river stations, the Sacramento River at Freeport and the San Joaquin River near Vernalis, located within the largely agricultural Central Valley, allow for an examination of pesticide concentrations and mass loading. Daily
Authors
Joseph L. Domagalski
Environmental regulation of sex determination in fishes: Insights from Atheriniformes
Sex determination is the first step toward the establishment of phenotypic sex in most vertebrates. Aquatic poikilotherms such as teleost fishes exhibit a high diversity of sex-determination mechanisms and gonadal phenotypes that are remarkably plastic and responsive to a variety of environmental factors (e.g., water temperature, pH, salinity, photoperiod, population density). This chapter reviews
Authors
Y. Yamamoto, R. S. Hattori, Reynaldo Patiño, C. A. Strüssmann
Invasive plant species
Invasive species may be one of the worts environmental problems facing the conservation of natural areas, because of their role in changing ecosystem function. At the same time, invasive species cause much human suffering and economic loss. The approach to eliminating invasive species can be improved by a better understanding of the various types of invasive species, and the scientific hypotheses
Authors
Beth A. Middleton
Modelling for catchment management
Catchment models are useful tools to help describe and quantify the sources, transport, and fate of sediment, nutrients, and other constituents in a landscape. Results from catchment models are used to quantify and understand existing conditions and used in restoration efforts by defining areas with highest contributions (hotspots, where actions would be most beneficial) and describing the relativ
Authors
Aroon Parshotam, Dale M. Robertson
Role of recovering river herring population on smallmouth bass diet and growth
Fish assemblages in Atlantic coastal rivers have undergone extensive ecological change in the last two and a half centuries due to human influence, including extirpation of many migratory fish species, such as river herring (Alosa spp.) and introduction of nonnative piscivores, notably Smallmouth Bass Micropterus dolomieu. Recently, dam removals and fish passage improvements in the Penobscot River
Authors
Jonathan M. Watson, Stephen M. Coghlan, Joseph D. Zydlewski, Daniel B. Hayes, Daniel S. Stich
U.S. Geological research at Grand Canyon National Park: A century of collaboration
(Fairley) When historians describe the decades preceding designation of Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP), they typically focus attention on early scientific studies conducted by John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and Charles Walcott. All three of these pioneering scientists were employed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a small Federal agency first established in 1879. Yet rarely do his
Authors
Helen C. Fairley