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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.

Filter Total Items: 171223

Data integration reveals dynamic and systematic patterns of breeding habitat use by a threatened shorebird

Incorporating species distributions into conservation planning has traditionally involved long-term representations of habitat use where temporal variation is averaged to reveal habitats that are most suitable across time. Advances in remote sensing and analytical tools have allowed for the integration of dynamic processes into species distribution modeling. Our objective was to develop a spatiote
Authors
Kristen S. Ellis, Michael J. Anteau, Garrett J. MacDonald, Rose J. Swift, Megan Ring, Dustin L. Toy, Mark H. Sherfy, Max Post van der Burg

Association of excessive precipitation and agricultural land use with honey bee colony performance

Context: From landscape variables to weather, multiple environmental factors affect honey bees and other pollinators. Detailed honey bee colony assessments in a variety of landscape and weather conditions offer the opportunity to develop a mechanistic understanding of how landscape composition, configuration, and weather are associated with colony nutrition, demography, and productivity.Objectives
Authors
Gabriela Quinlan, Rufus Isaacs, Clint R.V. Otto, Autumn H. Smart, Meghan O. Milbrath

Strontium isotope chronostratigraphic age of a sirenian fossil site on Santa Rosa Island, Channel Islands National Park, California

Fossils in the order Sirenia (family Dugongidae) from Santa Rosa Island, part of Channel Islands National Park in southern California, provide rare temporal and spatial links between earlier and later evolutionary forms of dugongids, and add information about their dispersal into the northeastern Pacific region. Marine sedimentary rocks containing these fossils have characteristics of both the lat
Authors
James B. Paces, Scott A. Minor, Kevin M. Schmidt, Jonathan Hoffman

Fish functional gradients along a reservoir cascade

1.The transformations of fish assemblages caused by reservoir cascades can be severe at the reach scale, but basin-scale effects are less clear. However, prevailing river concepts provide a framework for predicting basin-scale effects. 2. To determine if predictions made by the River Continuum Concept relative to the function of fish assemblages are sustained in a temperate river transformed into
Authors
Jordan C. Besson, Joshua J. Neary, Joshua D. Stafford, Corey Garland Dunn, Leandro E. Miranda

Sediment and nutrient deposition over a reconnected floodplain during large-scale river diversions, the Bonnet Carré spillway in 2011, 2016, and 2019

In hopes of reversing or slowing the decline of the river delta, water diversions have been built and planned, and natural diversions have formed and been allowed to develop along the lower Mississippi River. In addition to the possibility of building land, these diversions allow for the storage of nutrients within the deposited sediments and provide a buffer from coastal storm surge flooding. Dep
Authors
Daniel Kroes, Gregory Noe, David Ramirez, Brian Vosburg

National-scale assessment of total gaseous mercury isotopes across the United States

With the 2011 promulgation of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the successful negotiation by the United Nations Environment Program of the Minamata Convention, emissions of mercury (Hg) have declined in the United States. While the declines in atmospheric Hg concentrations in North America are encouraging, linking the declines to changing domest
Authors
Michael T. Tate, Sarah E. Janssen, Ryan F. Lepak, Laura Elizabeth Flucke, David P. Krabbenhoft

Coupling large-spatial scale larval dispersal modelling with barcoding to refine the amphi-Atlantic connectivity hypothesis in deep-sea seep mussels

In highly fragmented and relatively stable cold-seep ecosystems, species are expected to exhibit high migration rates and long-distance dispersal of long-lived pelagic larvae to maintain genetic integrity over their range. Accordingly, several species inhabiting cold seeps are widely distributed across the whole Atlantic Ocean, with low genetic divergence between metapopulations on both sides of t
Authors
Elodie Portanier, A. Nicolle, W. Rath, L. Monnet, G. Le Goff, A.-S. Le Port, C. Daguin-Thiébaut, Cheryl Morrison, M.R. Cunha, M. Betters, Craig M. Young, Cindy L. Van Dover, A. Biastoch, E. Thiébaut, Didier Jollivet

UAS-Based Observations of Infrasound Directionality at Stromboli Volcano, Italy

Infrasound (low frequency sound waves) can be used to monitor and characterize volcanic eruptions. However, infrasound sensors are usually placed on the ground, thus providing a limited sampling of the acoustic radiation pattern that can bias source size estimates. We present observations of explosive eruptions from a novel uncrewed aircraft system (UAS)-based infrasound sensor platform that was s
Authors
Alexandra M. Iezzi, Richard M. Buzard, David Fee, Robin S. Matoza, Julia E. Gestrich, Arthur Din Jolly, Markus Schmid, Valeria Cigala, Ulrich Kueppers, Caron E.J. Vossen, Corrado Cimarelli, Giorgio Lacanna, Maurizio Ripepe

Value-aligned planning objectives for restoring North Carolina aquatic resources

Rapid population growth and development in the southeastern United States have resulted in substantial impairment to freshwater aquatic ecosystems. National or regional restoration policies strive to address impaired ecosystems but can suffer from inconsistent and opaque processes. The Clean Water Act, for example, establishes reallocation mechanisms to transfer ecosystem services from sites of di
Authors
Ana María García, Mitchell Eaton, Georgina M. Sanchez, Jennifer L. Keisman, Kirsten Ullman, James Blackwell

Using neutral landscape models to evaluate the umbrella species concept in an ecotone

ContextSteep declines in North American rangeland biodiversity have prompted researchers and managers to use umbrella species as a tool to manage diverse suites of co-occurring wildlife, but efficacy of this method has been variable. Evaluation of prairie and shrubland grouse as umbrellas is typically restricted to observed overlap between umbrella and background species, but this approach does no
Authors
Courtney Duchardt, Adrian P. Monroe, David R. Edmunds, Matthew James Holloran, Alison G. Holloran, Cameron L. Aldridge

A conceptual framework for estimation of initial emergency food and water resource requirements in disasters

Many households lack the necessary food and water supplies to sustain themselves for more than three days during a disaster. Community vulnerability assessments can be used to identify households with more pressing needs for emergency food and water resources. It is critical that these assessments include the interaction between physical impacts to lifeline infrastructure and the social vulnerabil
Authors
Joseph Charles Toland, Anne Wein, An-Min Wu, Lauryn Spearing

Inferring pathogen presence when sample misclassification and partial observation occur

Surveillance programmes are essential for detecting emerging pathogens and often rely on molecular methods to make inference about the presence of a target disease agent. However, molecular methods rarely detect target DNA perfectly. For example, molecular pathogen detection methods can result in misclassification (i.e. false positives and false negatives) or partial detection errors (i.e. detecti
Authors
Evan H. Campbell Grant, Riley O. Mummah, Brittany A. Mosher, Jonah Evans, Graziella Vittoria Direnzo