Publications
Publications from USGS science centers throughout the Southeast Region.
Filter Total Items: 9967
Long-term apparent survival of a cold-stunned subpopulation of juveniles green turtles
Understanding the effects of extreme weather on animal populations is fundamental to ecological and conservation sciences and species management. Climate change has resulted in both warm and cold temperature extremes, including an increased frequency of severe cold snaps at middle latitudes in North America. These unusually cold air masses cause rapid declines in nearshore ocean temperatures in co
Authors
Robert Michael Mollenhauer, Margaret Lamont, Allen M. Foley
Coupling near-surface geomorphology with mangrove community diversity at the estuarine scale: A case study at Dongzhaigang Bay, China
Coastal wetlands are key features of the Earth’s surface and are characterized by a diverse array of coupled geomorphological and biological processes. However, the links between the distribution of biodiversity (e.g., species and structural diversity) and the formation of coastal geomorphology are not well understood on a landscape scale most useful to coastal zone managers. This study describes
Authors
Guogui Chen, Wei Hong, Xuan Gu, Ken Krauss, Kaiyuan Zhao, Haifeng Fu, Luzhen Chen, Mao Wang, Wenqing Wang
Impacts of ocean-atmosphere teleconnection patterns on the south-central United States
Recent research has linked the climate variability associated with ocean-atmosphere teleconnections to impacts rippling throughout environmental, economic, and social systems. This research reviews recent literature through 2021 in which we identify linkages among the major modes of climate variability, in the form of ocean-atmosphere teleconnections, and the impacts to temperature and precipitati
Authors
Robert V. Rohli, Gregg Snedden, Elinor R. Martin, Kristine L. DeLong
Characterization of vegetated and ponded wetlands with implications towards coastal wetland marsh collapse
Coastal wetlands provide numerous ecosystem services; yet these ecosystems are increasingly vulnerable to climate change stressors, especially excessive flooding from sea-level rise and storm events. This study highlights the important contribution of vegetation belowground biomass to marsh stability and identifies loss of vegetation as a critical driver of marsh collapse. We investigated the shea
Authors
Jack A. Cadigan, Navid H. Jafari, Camille Stagg, Claudia Laurenzano, Brian D. Harris, Amina E. Meselhe, Jason Dugas, Brady Couvillion
Causality guided machine learning model on wetland CH4 emissions across global wetlands
Wetland CH4 emissions are among the most uncertain components of the global CH4 budget. The complex nature of wetland CH4 processes makes it challenging to identify causal relationships for improving our understanding and predictability of CH4 emissions. In this study, we used the flux measurements of CH4 from eddy covariance towers (30 sites from 4 wetlands types: bog, fen, marsh, and wet tundra)
Authors
Kunxiaojia Yuan, Qing Zhu, Fa Li, William J. Riley, Margaret Torn, Housen Chu, Gavin McNicol, Mingshu Chen, Sara Knox, Kyle B. Delwiche, Huayi Wu, Dennis Baldocchi, Hongxu Ma, Ankur R. Desai, Jiquan Chen, Torsten Sachs, Masahito Ueyama, Oliver Sonnentag, Manuel Helbig, Eeva-Stiina Tuittila, Gerald Jurasinski, Franziska Koebsch, David I. Campbell, Hans Peter Schmid, Annalea Lohila, Mathias Goeckede, Mats B. Nilsson, Thomas Friborg, Joachim Jansen, Donatella Zona, Eugenie S. Euskirchen, Eric Ward, Gil Bohrer, Zhenong Jin, Licheng Liu, Hiroki Iwata, Jordan P. Goodrich, Robert B. Jackson
A synthesis of coral reef research at Buck Island Reef National Monument and Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands: 1961 to 2022
This synthesis focuses on the history of research on coral reefs within two U.S. National Park Service units in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands: Buck Island Reef National Monument (from 1961 to 2022) and Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve (from 1980 to 2022). Buck Island Reef National Monument (BUIS) is off the north shore of the island of St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin
Authors
Caroline Rogers
Upper Rio Grande Basin water-resource status and trends: Focus area study review and synthesis
The Upper Rio Grande Basin (URGB) is a critical international water resource under pressure from a myriad of climatic, ecological, infrastructural, water-use, and legal constraints. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive assessment of the spatial distribution and temporal trends of selected water-budget components (snow processes, evapotranspiration (ET), streamflow processes, a
Authors
Kyle R. Douglas-Mankin, Christine Rumsey, Graham A. Sexstone, Tamara I. Ivahnenko, Natalie Houston, Shaleene Chavarria, Gabriel B. Senay, Linzy K. Foster, Jonathan V. Thomas, Allison K. Flickinger, Amy E. Galanter, C. David Moeser, Toby L. Welborn, Diana E. Pedraza, Patrick M. Lambert, Michael Scott Johnson
Environmental DNA metabarcoding read numbers and their variability predict species abundance, but weakly in non-dominant species
Metabarcoding of environmental DNA (eDNA) provides more comprehensive, efficient, and non-invasive sampling of biological communities than conventional methods. However, limitations of metabarcoding include taxon-specific biases in amplification and sequencing that distort assessments of community composition. Further, hyper-abundant species may disproportionately affect community composition asse
Authors
James Skelton, Allison Cauvin, Margaret Hunter
The influence of submerged coastal structures on nearshore flows and wave runup
Engineered and natural submerged coastal structures (e.g., submerged breakwaters and reefs) modify incident wave fields and thus can alter hydrodynamic processes adjacent to coastlines. Although submerged structures are generally assumed to promote beach protection by dissipating waves offshore and creating sheltered conditions in their lee, their interaction with waves can result in mean wave-dri
Authors
Renan F. da Silva, Jeff Hansen, Dirk P. Rijnsdorp, Ryan Lowe, Mark L. Buckley
Genome resequencing clarifies phylogeny and reveals patterns of selection in the toxicogenomics model Pimephales promelas
BackgroundThe fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) is a model species for toxicological research. A high-quality genome reference sequence is available, and genomic methods are increasingly used in toxicological studies of the species. However, phylogenetic relationships within the genus remain incompletely known and little population-genomic data are available for fathead minnow despite the poten
Authors
Katy E. Klymus, Robert A. Hrabik, Nathan Thompson, Robert S. Cornman
Mismatches in scale between highly mobile marine megafauna and marine protected areas
Marine protected areas (MPAs), particularly large MPAs, are increasing in number and size around the globe in part to facilitate the conservation of marine megafauna under the assumption that large-scale MPAs better align with vagile life histories; however, this alignment is not well established. Using a global tracking dataset from 36 species across five taxa, chosen to reflect the span of home
Authors
Melinda G. Conners, Nicholas B. Sisson, Pierre D. Agamboue, Philip W. Atkinson, Alastair M. M. Baylis, Scott R. Benson, Barbara A. Block, Steven J. Bograd, Pablo Bordino, W. D. Bowen, Paul Brickle, Ignacio M. Bruno, Victoria González Carman, Cory D. Champagne, Daniel E. Crocker, Daniel P. Costa, Tiffany M. Dawson, Tomo Deguchi, Heidi Dewar, Philip D. Doherty, Tomoharu Eguchi, Angela Formia, Brendan J. Godley, Rachel T. Graham, Christian Gredzens, Kristen Hart, Lucy A. Hawkes, Suzanne Henderson, Robert William Henry, Luis A. Hückstädt, Ladd M. Irvine, Sarah S. Kienle, Carey E. Kuhn, Damian Lidgard, Stephanie A. Loredo, Bruce R. Mate, Kristian Metcalfe, Jacob Nzegoue, Carmen K. Kouerey Oliwina, Rachael A. Orben, Kiyoaki Ozaki, Richard Parnell, Elizabeth P. Pike, Patrick W. Robinson, Howard C. Rosenbaum, Fumio Sato, Scott A. Shaffer, Donna J. Shaver, Samantha E. Simmons, Brian J. Smith, Guy-Philippe Sounguet, Robert M. Suryan, David R. Thompson, Megan Tierney, Dominic Tilley, Hillary S. Young, Victoria Warwick-Evans, Michael J. Weise, Randall S. Wells, Bradley P. Wilkinson, Matthew J. Witt, Sara M. Maxwell
Urbanization and stream ecology: Moving the bar on multidisciplinary solutions to wicked urban stream problems
Decades of research on the effects of urbanization on stream ecology have shown that urban stream problems are inherently wicked. These problems are wicked in the sense that they are difficult to solve because information is incomplete, changing, or conflicting and because finding potential solutions often requires input from stakeholders who can have conflicting and competing values. The 5th Symp
Authors
Megan L. Fork, Kristina G. Hopkins, Jessica Chappell, Robert J. Hawley, Sujay S. Kaushal, Brian M. Murphy, Blanca Ríos-Touma, Allison H. Roy