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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Mission Area Publications
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Susceptibility of beavers to chronic wasting disease
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a contagious, fatal, neurodegenerative prion disease of cervids. The expanding geographical range and rising prevalence of CWD are increasing the risk of pathogen transfer and spillover of CWD to non-cervid sympatric species. As beavers have close contact with environmental and food sources of CWD infectivity, we hypothesized that they may be susceptible to CWD pri
Authors
Allen Jeffrey Herbst, Serene Wohlgemuth, Jing-Feng Yang, Andrew Castle, Diana Martinez Moreno, Alicia Otero, Judd M. Aiken, David Westaway, Debbie I. McKenzie
Detection and characterization of coastal tidal wetland change in the northeastern US using Landsat time series
Coastal tidal wetlands are highly altered ecosystems exposed to substantial risk due to widespread and frequent land-use change coupled with sea-level rise, leading to disrupted hydrologic and ecologic functions and ultimately, significant reduction in climate resiliency. Knowing where and when the changes have occurred, and the nature of those changes, is important for coastal communities and nat
Authors
Xiucheng Yang, Zhe Zhu, Shirley Qiu, Kevin D. Kroeger, Zhiliang Zhu, Scott Covington
Challenges in linking soil health to edge-of-field water quality across the Great Lakes basin
To better understand agricultural nutrient losses, we evaluated relationships between management (e.g., manure and tillage), soil health measurements, and resulting edge-of-field (EOF) surface water quality. This work was conducted before or early into conservation implementation at 14 Great Lakes Restoration Initiative EOF sites spanning Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and New York. Analyses
Authors
Kevin Fermanich, Molly Meyers, Luke C. Loken, Marianne Bischoff-Gray, Ronald Turco, Karen Stahlhber, Lisa Duriancik, Mathew Dornbush, Matthew J. Komiskey
Integration of satellite-based optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery to estimate winter cover crop performance in cereal grasses
The magnitude of ecosystem services provided by winter cover crops is linked to their performance (i.e., biomass and associated nitrogen content, forage quality, and fractional ground cover), although few studies quantify these characteristics across the landscape. Remote sensing can produce landscape-level assessments of cover crop performance. However, commonly employed optical vegetation indice
Authors
Jyoti Jennewein, Brian T Lamb, W. Dean Hively, Alison Thieme, Resham Thapa, Avi Goldsmith, Phillip Dennison
Determination of recharge areas that supply decades old groundwater to creeks inhabited by the threatened Okaloosa darter
The Okaloosa darter (Etheostoma okaloosae) is a diminutive, perch-like, benthic fish that inhabits only six small, clear, and shallow creek systems that flow almost entirely within Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of northwest Florida. Listed as Endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in 1973, improvements in erosion control and habitat restoration led to the Okaloosa darter
Authors
James E. Landmeyer, W. Scott McBride, William B. Tate
Rock-to-metal ratio: A foundational metric for understanding mine wastes
The quantity of ore mined and waste rock (i.e., overburden or barren rock) removed to produce a refined unit of a mineral commodity, its rock-to-metal ratio (RMR), is an important metric for understanding mine wastes and environmental burdens. In this analysis, we provide a comprehensive examination of RMRs for 25 commodities for 2018. The results indicate significant variability across commoditie
Authors
Nedal T. Nassar, Graham W. Lederer, Jaime L. Brainard, Abraham J. Padilla, Joseph D. Lessard
Prairie wetlands as sources or sinks of nitrous oxide: Effects of land use and hydrology
National and global greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets are continually being refined as data become available. Primary sources of the potent GHG nitrous oxide (N2O) include agricultural soil management and burning of fossil fuels, but comprehensive N2O budgets also incorporate less prominent factors such as wetlands. Freshwater wetland GHG flux estimates, however, have high uncertainty, and wetlands hav
Authors
Brian Tangen, Sheel Bansal
Assessing placement bias of the global river gauge network
Knowing where and when rivers flow is paramount to managing freshwater ecosystems. Yet stream gauging stations are distributed sparsely across rivers globally and may not capture the diversity of fluvial network properties and anthropogenic influences. Here we evaluate the placement bias of a global stream gauge dataset on its representation of socioecological, hydrologic, climatic and physiograph
Authors
Corey Krabbenhoft, George Allen, Peirong Lin, Sarah E Godsey, Daniel Allen, Ryan Burrows, Amanda DelVecchia, Ken M. Fritz, Margaret Shanafield, Amy J. Burgin, Margaret Zimmer, Thibault Datry, Walter K. Dodds, C. Nathan Jones, Meryl Mimms, Catherin Franklin, John C. Hammond, Samuel Zipper, Adam S Ward, Katie H. Costigan, Hylke Beck, Julian D. Olden
Plant community context controls short- vs. medium-term effects of pre-emergent herbicides on target and non-target species after fire
Questions: Selective herbicide application is a common restoration strategy to control exotic invaders that interfere with native plant recovery after wildfire. Whether spraying with preemergent or bioherbicides releases native plants from competition with exotics (“spray-and-release” strategy) and can make communities resistant to re-invasion by exotic annual grasses (e.g., cheatgrass, medusahead
Authors
Brynne E. Lazarus, Matthew Germino
Washington and Landsat
Washington is a State of untamed wonders, from its ruggedly beautiful coastline to the volcanic peaks of the Cascades. “The Evergreen State” is also a State of contrasts, home to rainforests west of the Cascades and deserts to the east. Half of Washington is forested, and its orchards grow more than one-half of the apples sold in the United States. Rivers are important to the State, particularly t
Authors
Interaction between climate and tectonics in the northern Lesser Antilles inferred from the last interglacial shoreline on Barbuda island
In the context of increasing evidence of plate interface coupling variability in subduction zones, there is a need to extend the short time window given by instrumental data and to gather data over multiple time and spatial scales. We hence investigated the long-term topography on Barbuda island, located in the northern part of the Lesser Antilles, west of the Caribbean subduction zone. Following
Authors
Jennifer Weil-Accardo, Nathalie Feuillet, Belle E. Philibosian, Abel Guihou, Eric Jacques, Guy Cabioch, André Anglade, Anne-Sophie Mériaux, Pierre Deschamps
Globally, tree fecundity exceeds productivity gradients
Lack of tree fecundity data across climatic gradients precludes the analysis of how seed supply contributes to global variation in forest regeneration and biotic interactions responsible for biodiversity. A global synthesis of raw seedproduction data shows a 250-fold increase in seed abundance from cold-dry to warm-wet climates, driven primarily by a 100-fold increase in seed production for a give
Authors
Valentin Journé, Robert A. Andrus, Marie-Claire Aravena Acuna, Davide Ascoli, Roberta Berretti, Daniel Berveiller, Michal Bogdziewicz, Thomas Boivin, Raul Bonal, Thomas Caignard, Rafael Calama, J. Julio Camarero, Chia-Hao Chang-Yang, Benoit Courbaud, Francois Courbet, Thomas Curt, Adrian Das, Evangelia Daskalakou, Hendrik Davi, Nicolas Delpierre, Sylvain Delzon, Michael Dietze, Sergio Donoso Calderon, Laurent Dormont, Josep Maria Espelta, Timothy J. Fahey, William Farfan-Rios, Catherine A. Gehring, Gregory S. Gilbert, Georg Gratzer, Cathryn H. Greenberg, Qinfeng Guo, Andrew Hacket-Pain, Arndt Hampe, Qingmin Han, Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, Kazuhiko Hoshizaki, Ines Ibanez, Jill F. Johnstone, Daisuke Kabeya, Roland Kays, Thomas Kitzberger, Johannes M. H. Knops, Richard K. Kobe, Georges Kunstler, Jonathan G. A. Lageard, Jalene M. LaMontagne, Theodor Leininger, Jean-Marc Limousin, James A. Lutz, Diana Macias, Eliot J. B. McIntire, Christopher M. Moore, Emily V. Moran, Renzo Motta, Jonathan A. Myers, Thomas A. Nagel, Kyotaro Noguchi, Jean-Marc Ourcival, Robert Parmenter, Ian Pearse, Ignacio M. Perez-Ramos, Lukasz Piechnik, John Poulsen, Renata Poulton-Kamakura, Tong Qiu, Miranda D. Redmond, Chantal D. Reid, Kyle C. Rodman, Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez, Javier D Sanguinetti, C. Lane Scher, Harald Schmidt Van Marle, Barbara Seget, Shubhi Sharma, Miles Silman, Michael A. Steele, Nathan L. Stephenson, Jacob N. Straub, Jennifer J. Swenson, Margaret Swift, Peter A. Thomas, Maria Uriarte, Giorgio Vacchiano, Thomas T. Veblen, Amy V. Whipple, Thomas G. Whitham, Boyd Wright, S. Joseph Wright, Kai Zhu, Jess K. Zimmerman, Roman Zlotin, Magdalena Zywiec, James S. Clark