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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

Water productivity studies from earth observation data: characterization, modeling and mapping water use and water productivity

No abstract available.
Authors
Antônio de C. Teixeira, Fernando B. T. Hernandez, Morris Scherer-Warren, Ricardo G. Andrade, Janice F. Leivas, Daniel C. Victoria, Edson L. Bolfe, Prasad S. Thenkabail, Renato A. M. Franco

Olistostrome shed eastward from the Antler orogenic forebulge, Bisoni-McKay area, Fish Creek Range, central Nevada

The Bisoni-McKay area, a structurally isolated, fault-bounded horst, offset eastward at the south end of the Fish Creek Range, displays a geologic terrane that is previously unrecorded in Nevada, and perhaps elsewhere in North America. This unique terrane is an olistostrome that was shed eastward by listric faulting from the east side of the migrating Antler orogenic forebulge in Late Devonian (ea
Authors
Forrest G. Poole, Charles Sandberg

Understanding natural capital

This chapter serves to introduce the geophysics of Neotropical steeplands. Topics are covered in a general manner with hyperlinks to active research and monitoring sites (such as the National Hurricane Center and US Geological Survey publication). Topics covered include ‘tropical climate and weather,’ ‘climate variations and trends,’ Neotropical ‘geology, and soils,’ ‘hillslopes and erosion,’ ‘lak
Authors
Robert F. Stallard

Copahue volcano and its regional magmatic setting

Copahue volcano (Province of Neuquen, Argentina) has produced lavas and strombolian deposits over several 100,000s of years, building a rounded volcano with a 3 km elevation. The products are mainly basaltic andesites, with the 2000–2012 eruptive products the most mafic. The geochemistry of Copahue products is compared with those of the main Andes arc (Llaima, Callaqui, Tolhuaca), the older Caviah
Authors
J. C. Varekamp, J. E. Zareski, L. M. Camfield, Erin Todd

Volcano monitoring from space

Unlike many natural hazards, volcanoes usually give warnings of impending eruptions that can be detected from hours to years prior to any hazardous activity [Sparks et al., 2012]. The Eyjafjallajökull eruption, for example, was preceded by several discrete episodes of subsurface magma accumulation that highlighted the potential for future eruption. Once it begins, an eruption can last for up to
Authors
Michael P. Poland

Application of MC1 to Wind Cave National Park: Lessons from a small-scale study: Chapter 8

MC1 was designed for application to large regions that include a wide range in elevation and topography, thereby encompassing a broad range in climates and vegetation types. The authors applied the dynamic global vegetation model MC1 to Wind Cave National Park (WCNP) in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota, USA, on the ecotone between ponderosa pine forest to the northwest and mixed-grass prai
Authors
David A. King, Dominique M. Bachelet, Amy J. Symstad

Spotted bass Micropterus punctulatus (Rafinesque 1819)

Three subspecies of Spotted Bass Micropterus punctulatus were historically recognized: the smaller Northern Spotted Bass M. p. punctulatus, the larger, longer-lived Alabama Spotted Bass M. p. henshalli, and the now invalidated Wichita Spotted Bass M. p. wichitae (Bailey and Hubbs 1940; Cofer 1995; Warren 2009; Rider and Maceina 2015, this volume). The subspecific status has been examined over the
Authors
Timothy N. Churchill, Phillip William Bettoli

Forested wetland habitat

A forested wetland (swamp) is a forest where soils are saturated or flooded for at least a portion of the growing season, and vegetation, dominated by trees, is adapted to tolerate flooded conditions. A tidal freshwater forested wetland is a forested wetland that experiences frequent but short-term surface flooding via tidal action, with average salinity of soil porewater less than 0.5 g/l. It is
Authors
Jamie A. Duberstein, Ken W. Krauss

Approaches to modeling landscape-scale drought-induced forest mortality

Drought stress is an important cause of tree mortality in forests, and drought-induced disturbance events are projected to become more common in the future due to climate change. Landscape Disturbance and Succession Models (LDSM) are becoming widely used to project climate change impacts on forests, including potential interactions with natural and anthropogenic disturbances, and to explore the e
Authors
Eric J. Gustafson, Douglas J. Shinneman

Simulating forest landscape disturbances as coupled human and natural systems

Anthropogenic disturbances resulting from human land use affect forest landscapes over a range of spatial and temporal scales, with diverse influences on vegetation patterns and dynamics. These processes fall within the scope of the coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) concept, which has emerged as an important framework for understanding the reciprocal interactions and feedbacks that connect
Authors
Michael Wimberly, Terry L. Sohl, Zhihua Liu, Aashis Lamsal

From bacteria to elephants: Effects of land-use legacies on biodiversity and ecosystem structure in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem: Chapter 8

Generally, ecological research has considered the aboveground and belowground components of ecosystems separately. Consequently, frameworks for integrating the two components are not well developed. Integrating the microbial components into ecosystem ecology requires different approaches from those offered by plant ecology, partly because of the scales at which microbial processes operate and part
Authors
Louis V. Verchot, Naomi L. Ward, Jayne Belnap, Deborah Bossio, Michael Coughenour, John Gibson, Olivier Hanotte, Andrew N. Muchiru, Susan L. Phillips, Blaire Steven, Diana H. Wall, Robin S. Reid