Publications
These publications showcase the significant science conducted in our Science Centers.
Filter Total Items: 16783
Practical field survey operations for flood insurance rate maps
The U.S. Geological Survey assists the Federal Emergency Management Agency in its mission to identify flood hazards and zones for risk premiums for communities nationwide, by creating flood insurance rate maps through updating hydraulic models that use river geometry data. The data collected consist of elevations of river channels, banks, and structures, such as bridges, dams, and weirs that can a
Authors
Nicholas J. Taylor, Caelan E. Simeone
Causes of delayed outbreak responses and their impacts on epidemic spread
Livestock diseases have devastating consequences economically, socially and politically across the globe. In certain systems, pathogens remain viable after host death, which enables residual transmissions from infected carcasses. Rapid culling and carcass disposal are well-established strategies for stamping out an outbreak and limiting its impact; however, wait-times for these procedures, i.e. re
Authors
Y Tao, William J. M. Probert, Katriona Shea, Michael C. Runge, Kevin D. Lafferty, Michael J. Tildesley, Matthew J. Ferrari
An increase in the slope of the concentration-discharge relation for total organic carbon in major rivers in New England, 1973 to 2019
The mobilization and transport of organic carbon (OC) in rivers and delivery to the near-coastal ocean are important processes in the carbon cycle that are affected by both climate and anthropogenic activities. Riverine OC transport can affect carbon sequestration, contaminant transport, ocean acidification, the formation of toxic disinfection by-products, ocean temperature and phytoplankton produ
Authors
Thomas G. Huntington, Michael Wieczorek
Molecular and isotopic gas composition of the Devonian Berea Sandstone and implications for gas evolution, eastern Kentucky
Since 2011, the Devonian Berea Sandstone in northeastern Kentucky has produced oil where thermal maturity studies indicate that likely source rocks, namely, the Devonian Ohio Shale and Mississippian Sunbury Shale, are thermally immature. Downdip, where source rocks are mature for oil, the Berea Sandstone and Ohio Shale primarily produce gas. To investigate this thermal maturity discordancy, the mo
Authors
T. M. Parris, Paul C. Hackley, S. F. Greb, C. F. Eble
Accommodating the role of site memory in dynamic species distribution models
First-order dynamic occupancy models (FODOMs) are a class of state-space model in which the true state (occurrence) is observed imperfectly. An important assumption of FODOMs is that site dynamics only depend on the current state and that variations in dynamic processes are adequately captured with covariates or random effects. However, it is often difficult to understand and/or measure the covari
Authors
Graziella Vittoria Direnzo, David A. W. Miller, Blake R. Hossack, Brent H. Sigafus, Paige E. Howell, Erin L. Muths, Evan H. Campbell Grant
Mineral commodity summaries 2021
IntroductionEach mineral commodity chapter of the 2021 edition of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries (MCS) includes information on events, trends, and issues for each mineral commodity as well as discussions and tabular presentations on domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, 5-year salient statistics, and world production and resources. The MCS is the
Authors
Using decision science for monitoring threatened western snowy plovers to inform recovery
Western Snowy Plovers (Charadrius nivosus nivosus) are federally listed under the US Endangered Species Act as Threatened. They occur along the US Pacific coastline and are threatened by habitat loss and destruction and excessive levels of predation and human disturbance. Populations have been monitored since the 1970s for distribution, reproduction, and survival. Since the species was federally l
Authors
Bruce G. Marcot, James E. Lyons, Daniel C Elbert, Laura Todd
Re‐purposing groundwater flow models for age assessments: Important characteristics
Groundwater flow model construction is often time‐consuming and costly, with development ideally focused on a specific purpose, such as quantifying well capture from water bodies or providing flow fields for simulating advective transport. As environmental challenges evolve, the incentive to re‐purpose existing groundwater flow models may increase. However, few studies have evaluated which charact
Authors
Paul F. Juckem, J. Jeffrey Starn
The role of hydrates, competing chemical constituents, and surface composition on CLNO2 formation
Atomic chlorine (Cl•) affects air quality and atmospheric oxidizing capacity. Nitryl chloride (ClNO2) – a common Cl• source–forms when chloride-containing aerosols react with dinitrogen pentoxide (N2O5). A recent study showed that saline lakebed (playa) dust is an inland source of particulate chloride (Cl–) that generates high ClNO2. However, the underlying physiochemical factors responsible for o
Authors
Haley M. Royer, Dhruv Mitroo, Sarah M. Hayes, Savannah Haas, Kerri A Pratt, Patricia Blackwelder, Thomas E. Gill, Cassandra J. Gaston
Cloud-native repositories for big scientific data
Scientific data have traditionally been distributed via downloads from data server to local computer. This way of working suffers from limitations as scientific datasets grow toward the petabyte scale. A “cloud-native data repository,” as defined in this article, offers several advantages over traditional data repositories—performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, collaboration, reproducibilit
Authors
Ryan Abernathey, Tom Augspurger, Anderson Banihirwe, Charles C. Blackmon-Luca, Timothy Crone, Chelle Gentemann, Joseph Hamman, Naomi Henderson, Chiara Lepore, Theo McCaie, Niall Robinson, Richard P. Signell
Phylogeographic genetic diversity in the white sucker hepatitis B Virus across the Great Lakes Region and Alberta, Canada
Hepatitis B viruses belong to a family of circular, double-stranded DNA viruses that infect a range of organisms, with host responses that vary from mild infection to chronic infection and cancer. The white sucker hepatitis B virus (WSHBV) was first described in the white sucker (Catostomus commersonii), a freshwater teleost, and belongs to the genus Parahepadnavirus. At present, the host range of
Authors
Cynthia R Adams, Vicki S. Blazer, Jim Sherry, Robert S. Cornman, Luke R. Iwanowicz
Computational methodology to analyze the effect of mass transfer rate on attenuation of leaked carbon dioxide in shallow aquifers
Exsolution and re-dissolution of CO2 gas within heterogeneous porous media are investigated using experimental data and mathematical modeling. In a set of bench-scale experiments, water saturated with CO2 under a given pressure is injected into a 2-D water-saturated porous media system, causing CO2 gas to exsolve and migrate upwards. A layer of fine sand mimicking a heterogeneity within a shallow
Authors
Radek Fucik, Jakub Solovsky, Michelle R. Plampin, Hao Wu, Jiri Mikyska, Tissa H. Illangasekare