Publications
Browse more than 160,000 publications authored by our scientists over the past 100+ year history of the USGS. Publications available are: USGS-authored journal articles, series reports, book chapters, other government publications, and more.
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Scanning electron microscopic evaluation of broad ion beam milling effects to sedimentary organic matter: Sputter-induced artifacts or naturally occurring porosity?
Research examining organic-matter hosted porosity has significantly increased during the last decade due to greater focus on understanding hydrocarbon migration and storage in source-rock reservoirs, and technological advances in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) capabilities. The examination of nanometer-scale organic-matter hosted porosity by SEM requires the preparation of exceptionally flat g
Authors
Brett J. Valentine, Paul C. Hackley
Restoration of Gavia immer (common loon) in Minnesota—2022 annual report
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon mobile drilling platform on April 20, 2010, caused a massive oil spill and injury to natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico. Gavia immer (common loon) were negatively affected from the spill. The Open Ocean Trustee Implementation Group funded the project “Restoration of Common Loons in Minnesota” to restore common loons lost to the spill. Here, we report on
Authors
William S. Beatty, Luke J. Fara, Steven C. Houdek, Robert Rabasco, Spencer Rettler, Elizabeth Rasmussen, Kevin P. Kenow, Brian R. Gray, Steven Yang, Kelly Amoth
Estimating fat content in barred owls (Strix varia) with predictive models developed from direct measures of proximate body composition
Body condition indices and related metrics can help assess habitat quality and other ecological processes, and ideally, these metrics are based on measures of lipids directly extracted from the species of interest. In recent decades, barred owls (Strix varia) have become a species of conservation concern as they invaded older forests of the US Pacific Northwest, and caused population declines of t
Authors
Ryan C. Baumbusch, Katie Dugger, David Wiens
Reanalysis ignores pertinent data, includes inappropriate observations, and disregards realities of applied ecology: Response to Huso and Dalthorp (2023)
1) We recently demonstrated efficacy of automated curtailment of wind turbines in reducing fatalities of eagles at a study site in Wyoming, USA. Huso and Dalthorp criticize our work, asserting that there are several ‘major errors’ that render our previous work as providing ‘no meaningful support’ for automated curtailment. As we show here, our data do indeed provide support for the efficacy of aut
Authors
Christopher J.W. McClure, Brian W. Rolek, Leah Dunn, Jennifer D. McCabe, Luke Martinson, Todd E. Katzner
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