Publications

This study focused on the mixing of a solute, assumed to be conservative, introduced to one arm of an afterbay reservoir, between Keswick and Shasta Dams on the Sacramento River near Redding, California. Rhodamine water tracer (WT) dye served as the solute in a field experiment, and was introduced over 4.5 h and monitored for 4 days by sondes moored in the reservoir. The scenario was...

The Sacramento River Nutrient Change Study (SRiNCS) was developed with input from multiple stakeholders in the Delta Regional Monitoring Program, as well as the State Water Contractors. We tracked the effects of changes in nutrient loading resulting from a short-term wastewater hold at the Sacramento River Wastewater Treatment Plant (SRWTP). In the summer of 2019, scheduled wastewater...

Quaternary marine and continental shales in the western United States are sources of selenium that can be loaded into the aquatic environment through mining, agricultural, and energy production processes. The mobilization of selenium from shales through agricultural irrigation has been recognized since the 1930s; however, discovery of deformities in birds and other wildlife using...

Hawaiian coastal wetlands provide important habitat for federally endangered waterbirds and socio-cultural resources for Native Hawaiians. Currently, Hawaiian coastal wetlands are degraded by development, sedimentation, and invasive species and, thus, require restoration. Little is known about their original structure and function due to the large-scale alteration of the lowland...

The Longfin Smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) population in the San Franscisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Bay-Delta) has declined to ∼1% of its pre-1980s abundance and, as a result, is listed as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. The reasons for this decline are multiple and complex, including the impacts of contaminants. Because the spawning and rearing seasons...

The northern California littoral cell of the Klamath River, which is a mixed rocky and sandy system with significant shoreline curvature, was investigated by examining ∼40 yr of satellite-derived shoreline positions and historical records. We find that an accretion wave of sediment was initiated near the Klamath River mouth in the late 1980s and translated downcoast over the subsequent...

Neonicotinoid seed treatments are commonly used in agricultural production even though their benefit to crop yield and their impact on pollinators, particularly wild bees, remains unclear. Using an on-farm matched pair design in which half of each field was sown with thiamethoxam treated seed and half without, we assessed honey bee and wild bee exposure to pesticides in sunflower fields...

Groundwater quality in the Northern San Joaquin Valley region of California was studied as part of California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) Groundwater Ambient Monitoring and Assessment Program-Priority Basin Project (GAMA-PBP). The GAMA-PBP made a spatially unbiased assessment of the aquifer system used for domestic drinking-water supply in the study region and compared...

FloPy is a popular Python package for creating, running, and post-processing MODFLOW-based groundwater flow and transport models. FloPy functionality has expanded to support the latest version of MODFLOW (MODFLOW 6) including support for unstructured grids. FloPy can be used to download MODFLOW-based and other executables for Linux, MacOS, and Windows operating systems, which simplifies...

Dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae) frequently traverse agricultural matrices in search of ephemeral dung resources and spend extended periods of time burrowing in soil. Neonicotinoids are among the most heavily applied and widely detected insecticides used in conventional agriculture with formulated products designed for row crop and livestock pest suppression. Here, we determined...

The ability of ‘digital agriculture’ to support on-farm decision making is predicated on the real-time combination of observations and prior knowledge into an integrated digital environment. The mathematical discipline that seeks to provide this integration is known as model data assimilation (DA), with demonstrated benefits including improved predictive reliability, and the capacity to...