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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: 171176

A far-traveled basalt lava flow in north-central Oregon, USA

Widely separated basalt lava-flow outcrops in north-central Oregon, USA, expose products of a single eruptive episode. A Pliocene lava flow, here informally termed the Tetherow basalt, issued from vents near Redmond, in the Deschutes basin of Oregon, as a plains-forming basalt now exposed in continuous outcrops northward for 60 km. A similar basalt crops out 47 km farther north, near Maupin, withi
Authors
Anthony Francis Pivarunas, David R. Sherrod, Jim E. O'Connor, Charles M. Cannon, Mark E. Stelten

Evaluating spatial coverage of the greater sage-grouse umbrella to conserve sagebrush-dependent species biodiversity within the Wyoming basins

Biodiversity is threatened due to land-use change, overexploitation, pollution, and anthropogenic climate change, altering ecosystem functioning around the globe. Protecting areas rich in biodiversity is often difficult without fully understanding and mapping species’ ecological niche requirements. As a result, the umbrella species concept is often applied, whereby conservation of a surrogate spec
Authors
Cameron L. Aldridge, D. Joanne Saher, Julie A. Heinrichs, Adrian P. Monroe, Matthias Leu, Steve E. Hanser

The economics of decarbonizing Costa Rica's agriculture, forestry and other land uses sectors

In 2018, Costa Rica demonstrated its commitment to the Paris Agreement and published its Decarbonization Plan for achieving zero net emissions by the year 2050. We evaluate the impacts of the country's strategy for decarbonizing its Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses (AFOLU) sectors by coupling the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling framework with high-resolution spatial land use-la
Authors
Onil Banerjee, Martin Cicowiez, Renato Vargas, Edmundo Molina-Perez, Kenneth J. Bagstad, Ziga Malek

Identifying and constraining marsh-type transitions in response to increasing erosion over the past century

Marsh environments, characterized by their flora and fauna, change laterally in response to shoreline erosion, water levels and inundation, and anthropogenic activities. The Grand Bay coastal system (USA) has undergone multiple large-scale geomorphic and hydrologic changes resulting in altered sediment supply, depositional patterns, and degraded barrier islands, leaving wetland salt marshes vulner
Authors
Alisha M. Ellis, Christopher G. Smith, Kathryn Smith, Jessica A. Jacobs

Recent increases in annual, seasonal, and extreme methane fluxes driven by changes in climate and vegetation in boreal and temperate wetland ecosystems

Climate warming is expected to increase global methane (CH4) emissions from wetland ecosystems. Although in situ eddy covariance (EC) measurements at ecosystem scales can potentially detect CH4 flux changes, most EC systems have only a few years of data collected, so temporal trends in CH4 remain uncertain. Here, we use established drivers to hindcast changes in CH4 fluxes (FCH4) since the early 1
Authors
Sarah Feron, Avni Malhotra, Sheel Bansal, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Gavin McNicol, Sarah Knox, Kyle Delwiche, Raul Cordero, Zutao Ouyang, Zhen Zhang, Benjamin Poulter, Robert B. Jackson

Modeling the response of an endangered rabbit population to RHDV2 and vaccination

Rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus 2 (RHDV2), recently detected in the western United States, has the potential to cause mass mortality events in wild rabbit and hare populations. Currently, few management strategies exist other than vaccination. We developed a spatially explicit model of RHDV2 for a population of riparian brush rabbits (Sylvilagus bachmani riparius), a subspecies of brush rabbit cl
Authors
Robin Russell, Robert J. Dusek, Stephanie Prevost, Deana L. Clifford, Megan Moriarty, Fumika Takahashi

Dynamic modeling of coastal compound flooding hazards due to tides, extratropical storms, waves, and sea-level rise: A case study in the Salish Sea, Washington (USA)

The Puget Sound Coastal Storm Modeling System (PS-CoSMoS) is a tool designed to dynamically downscale future climate scenarios (i.e., projected changes in wind and pressure fields and temperature) to compute regional water levels, waves, and compound flooding over large geographic areas (100 s of kilometers) at high spatial resolutions (1 m) pertinent to coastal hazard assessments and planning. Th
Authors
Kees Nederhoff, Sean C. Crosby, Nathan R. vanArendonk, Eric E. Grossman, Babak Tehranirad, T. Leijnse, W. Klessens, Patrick L. Barnard

Mixture effects of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances on embryonic and larval Sheepshead Minnows (Cyprinodon variegatus)

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are ubiquitous and persistent environmental contaminants originating from many everyday products. Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) are two PFAS that are commonly found at high concentrations in aquatic environments. Both chemicals have previously been shown to be toxic to fish, as well as having complex and largely un
Authors
Philip Tanabe, Peter B. Key, Katy W. Chung, Emily C. Pisarski, Jessica L. Reiner, Rodowa. Alix E., Jason Tyler Magnuson, Marie E. DeLorenzo

Scattered tree death contributes to substantial forest loss in California

In recent years, large-scale tree mortality events linked to global change have occurred around the world. Current forest monitoring methods are crucial for identifying mortality hotspots, but systematic assessments of isolated or scattered dead trees over large areas are needed to reduce uncertainty on the actual extent of tree mortality. Here, we mapped individual dead trees in California using
Authors
Yang Cheng, Stefan Oehmcke, Martin Brandt, Lisa Micaela Rosenthal, Adrian Das, Anton Vrieling, Sassan Saatchi, Fabien Wagner, Maurice Mugabowindekwe, Wim Verbruggen, Claus Beier, Stephanie Horion

Hybrid CPU-GPU solution to regularized divergence-free curl-curl equations for electromagnetic inversion problems

The Curl-Curl equation is the foundation of time-harmonic electromagnetic (EM) problems in geophysics. The efficiency of its solution is key to EM simulations, accounting for over 95% of the computation cost in geophysical inversions for magnetotelluric or controlled-source EM problems. However, most published EM inversion codes are still central processing unit (CPU)-based and cannot utilize rece
Authors
Hao Dong, Kai Sun, Gary D. Egbert, Anna Kelbert, Naser Meqbel

Novel technique for suppressing an invasive apex predator minimally alters nitrogen dynamics in Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming, USA

Non-native species have invaded most ecosystems and methods are needed to manage them, especially in locations with sensitive species where they cannot be easily extirpated. Gillnetting for invasive lake trout [Salvelinus namaycush (Walbaum, 1792)] in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, USA began in 1995 and their carcasses are deposited into deep areas. This suppression method was recent
Authors
Lusha M. Tronstad, Dominique R. Lujan, Michelle A. Briggs, Lindsey K. Albertson, Hayley C. Glassic, Christopher S. Guy, Todd M. Koel

Temporal variability in irrigated land and climate influences on salinity loading across the Upper Colorado River Basin, 1986-2017

Freshwater salinization is a growing global concern impacting human and ecosystem needs with impacts to water availability for human and ecological uses. In the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), dissolved solids in streams compound ongoing water supply challenges to further limit water availability and cause economic damages. Much effort has been dedicated to understanding dissolved solid sources
Authors
Olivia L. Miller, Annie L. Putman, Richard A. Smith, Gregory E. Schwarz, Michael D. Hess, Morgan C. McDonnell, Daniel Jones