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Book Chapters

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: 6063

Managing state lands for wildlife

State-owned lands are a vital component of state fish and wildlife management programs because they contain valuable habitats for a diversity of wild species and often provide important public access. The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA 2017) reported state agencies manage or administer approximately 188 million hectares of land, including 10 million hectares under fee title owners
Authors
Thomas Ryder, John F. Organ

The field trip that changed the course of my career

After gobbling down a breakfast of sliced papaya, scrambled eggs, refried beans, and soft flour tacos, we gathered our gear and loaded it into the red zodiac that the station manager had assigned to us. My colleagues and I were headed to a pair of islands off the coast of Belize called Twin Cays, occupied by a unique group of tropical plants and animals adapted to a wet and saline habitat. Our r
Authors
Karen L. McKee

My life in dogs

No abstract available.
Authors
Beth Middleton

Groundwater and surface water: What, they’re actually connected?

No abstract available.
Authors
Donald O. Rosenberry

Applications of knowledge and predictions of atmospheric rivers

This chapter reviews how AR research is being applied in real-world situations to address issues of flood planning and emergency intervention. It includes water supply management case studies. Examples comprise five distinct sections that show how AR research is being directly applied to the challenges that water managers, dam operators, crisis-management engineers such as USACE, National Weather
Authors
Schick Lawrence, Michael Anderson, F Martin Ralph, Michael D. Dettinger, David A. Lavers, Florian Pappenberger, David Richardson, Ervin Zsoter

Beloniformes: Belonidae (Needlefishes) and Hemiramphidae (Halfbeaks)

The order Beloniformes (or Synentognathi) contains two suborders, six families, 37 genera, and about 235 species of atherinomorph fishes (Rosen & Parenti 1981; Collette et al. 1984; Collette 2004). Features common to these fishes include dorsal and anal fins on the rear half of the body, abdominal pelvic fins with six soft rays, no fin spines, lateral line running along the ventral edge of the bod
Authors
Bruce B. Collette, Stephen Walsh

A science business model for answering important questions

Perhaps the biggest question in science is how to do better science. Many ecologists, including this book’s editors and authors, have succeeded under the current science “business model” and, from our perspective, the status quo works well enough. But science business models are under increased scrutiny. For instance, since 2012, at least nine papers have critiqued government-sponsored biomedical
Authors
Kevin D. Lafferty

Quantitative paleoflood hydrology

This chapter reviews the paleohydrologic techniques and approaches used to reconstruct the magnitude and frequency of past floods using geological evidence. Quantitative paleoflood hydrology typically leads to two phases of analysis: (1) documentation and assessment of flood physical evidence (paleostage indicators), and (2) relating identified flood evidence to flood discharge, based on hydraulic
Authors
Gerardo Benito, Jim E. O'Connor

Global islands

A new map of global islands at a high spatial resolution (30 m) has been produced from a semi-automated interpretation of 2014 satellite imagery. The data are available in the public domain. The islands were classified by size into continental mainlands (5), big islands > 1 km2 (21,818), and small islands ≤ 1 km2 (318,868). The new high-resolution islands data are intended to support coastal ecosy
Authors
Madeline Thomas Martin, Roger Sayre, Keith Van Graafeiland, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, David Will, Dena R. Spatz, Nicholas Holmes