Publications
USGS research activities relevant to Alaska have yielded more than 9400 historical publications. This page features some of the most recent newsworthy research findings.
Filter Total Items: 2891
Ice wedge degradation and stabilization impacts water budgets and nutrient cycling in Arctic trough ponds
Trough ponds are ubiquitous features of Arctic landscapes and an important component of freshwater aquatic ecosystems. Permafrost thaw causes ground subsidence, creating depressions that gather water, creating ponds. Permafrost thaw also releases solutes and nutrients, which may fertilize these newly formed ponds. We measured water budget elements and chloride, ammonium, and dissolved organic nitr
Authors
Joshua C. Koch, M. Torre Jorgenson, Kimberly P. Wickland, Mikhail Z. Kanevskiy, Robert G. Striegl
Changing station coverage impacts temperature trends in the Upper Colorado River Basin
Over the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), temperatures in widely used gridded data products do not warm as much as mean temperatures from a stable set of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations, located at generally lower elevations, in most months of the year. This is contrary to expectations of elevation-dependent warming, which suggests that warming increases with elevation. Thes
Authors
Stephanie A. McAfee, Gregory J. McCabe, Stephen Gray, Gregory T. Pederson
Drought and fire in the western USA: Is climate attribution enough?
Purpose of ReviewI sought to review the contributions of recent literature and prior foundational papers to our understanding of drought and fire. In this review, I summarize recent literature on drought and fire in the western USA and discuss research directions that may increase the utility of that body of work for twenty-first century application. I then describe gaps in the synthetic knowledge
Authors
Jeremy Littell
Downscaling of climate model output for Alaskan stakeholders
The paper summarizes an end-to-end activity connecting the global climate modeling enterprise with users of climate information in Alaska. The effort included retrieval of the requisite observational datasets and model output, a model evaluation and selection procedure, the actual downscaling by the delta method with its inherent bias-adjustment, and the provision of products to a range of users t
Authors
John E. Walsh, Uma S. Bhatt, Jeremy Littell, Matthew Leonawicz, Michael Lindgren, Thomas A. Kurkowski, Peter A. Bieniek, Richard Thoman, Stephen Gray, T. Scott Rupp
NDVI exhibits mixed success in predicting spatiotemporal variation in caribou summer forage quality and quantity
The satellite‐derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is commonly used by researchers and managers to represent ungulate forage conditions in landscapes across the globe, despite limited information about how it compares to empirical measurements of forage quality and quantity. The application of NDVI as a forage metric is particularly appealing for studying migratory caribou (Rangif
Authors
Heather E. Johnson, David D. Gustine, Trevor S. Golden, Layne G. Adams, Lincoln S. Parrett, Elizabeth A. Lenart, Perry S. Barboza
Inventory of lowland-breeding birds on the Alaska Peninsula
We conducted the first systematic inventory of birds in the lowlands (areas ≤100 m above sea level) of the Alaska Peninsula during summers of 2004–2007 to determine their breeding distributions and habitat associations in this remote region. Using a stratified random survey design, we allocated sample plots by elevation and land cover with a preference for wetland cover types used by shorebirds, a
Authors
Susan E. Savage, T. Lee Tibbitts, Kristin Sesser, Robb S.A. Kaler
Museum metabarcoding: a novel method revealing gut helminth communities of small mammals across space and time
Natural history collections spanning multiple decades provide fundamental historical baselines to measure and understand changing biodiversity. New technologies such as next generation DNA sequencing (NGS) have considerably increased the potential of museum specimens to address significant questions regarding the impact of environmental changes on host and parasite/pathogen dynamics. We developed
Authors
Stephen E. Greiman, Joseph A. Cook, Vasyl V. Tkach, Eric P. Hoberg, Damian M. Menning, Andrew G. Hope, Sarah A. Sonsthagen, Sandra L. Talbot
Fuelling conditions at staging sites can mitigate Arctic warming effects in a migratory bird
Under climate warming, migratory birds should align reproduction dates with advancing plant and arthropod phenology. To arrive on the breeding grounds earlier, migrants may speed up spring migration by curtailing the time spent en route, possibly at the cost of decreased survival rates. Based on a decades-long series of observations along an entire flyway, we show that when refuelling time is limi
Authors
Eldar Rakhimberdiev, Sjoerd Duijns, Julia Karagicheva, Cornelis J. Camphuysen, Anne Dekinga, Rob Dekker, Anatoly Gavrilov, Job ten Horn, Joop Jukema, Anatoly Saveliev, Mikhail Soloviev, T. Lee Tibbitts, Jan A. van Gils, Theunis Piersma, VRS Castricum
Trends and traditions: Overview and synthesis
This paper provides an overview by the editors of a collection of 25 papers for the Studies of Western Birds, to be published in a single volume by Western Field Ornithologists. The title of the volume is: "Trends and traditions: Avifaunal change in western North America."
Authors
W David Shuford, Robert E. Gill, Colleen M. Handel
A decade of remotely sensed observations highlight complex processes linked to coastal permafrost bluff erosion in the Arctic
Eroding permafrost coasts are indicators and integrators of changes in the Arctic System as they are susceptible to the combined effects of declining sea ice extent, increases in open water duration, more frequent and impactful storms, sea-level rise, and warming permafrost. However, few observation sites in the Arctic have yet to link decadal-scale erosion rates with changing environmental condit
Authors
Benjamin M. Jones, Louise M. Farquharson, Carson Baughman, Richard M. Buzard, Christopher D. Arp, Guido Grosse, Diana L. Bull, Frank Günther, Ingmar Nitze, Frank Urban, Jeremy L. Kasper, Jennifer M. Frederick, Matthew A. Thomas, Craig Jones, Alejandro Mota, Scott Dallimore, Craig E. Tweedie, Christopher V. Maio, Daniel H. Mann, Bruce M. Richmond, Ann E. Gibbs, Ming Xiao, Torsten Sachs, Go Iwahana, Mikhail Z. Kanevskiy, Vladimir E. Romanovsky
Unusual foraging observations associated with seabird die-offs in Alaska
We report the first documentation of off-water foraging by the Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel Oceanodroma furcata and Short-tailed Shearwater Ardenna tenuirostris, a behavior not previously documented in any member of the families Hydrobatidae or Procellariidae. Over a two-week period in September 2016, we regularly observed individuals of these species over land on an extensive intertidal zone on the B
Authors
Bryce Robinson, Lucas H. DeCicco, James A. Johnson, Daniel R. Ruthrauff
Shorebirds adjust spring arrival schedules with variable environmental conditions: Four decades of assessment on the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska
Arctic summers are brief, and there has been strong selection for migratory birds to
arrive in Arctic nesting areas as early as possible to time breeding with peak food availability
and complete reproduction. The timing of emergence of nesting habitat in spring is, however,
extremely variable in the Arctic, and few long-term studies have examined the ability of avian
migrants to track spring condi
Authors
Craig R. Ely, Brian McCaffery, Robert E. Gill