Publications

Pesticides are widely recognized as important biological stressors in streams, especially in heavily developed urban and agricultural areas like the Central California Coast region. We assessed occurrence and potential toxicity of pesticides in small streams in the region using two analytical methods: a broad-spectrum (223 compounds) method in use since 2012 and a newly developed method...

Relations between spectral absorbance and fluorescence properties of water and human-associated and fecal indicator bacteria were developed for facilitating field sensor applications to estimate wastewater contamination in waterways. Leaking wastewater conveyance infrastructure commonly contaminates receiving waters. Methods to quantify such contamination can be time consuming, expensive...

Executive Summary The Los Angeles Coastal Plain (LACP) covers about 580 square miles and is the largest coastal plain of semiarid southern California. The LACP is heavily developed with mostly residential, commercial, and industrial land uses that rely heavily on groundwater for water supply. In 2010, the LACP was home to about 14 percent of California’s population, or about 5.4 million...

Most Americans receive their drinking water from publicly supplied sources, a large portion of it from groundwater. Mapping these populations consistently and at a high resolution is important for understanding where the resource is used and needs to be protected. The results show that 269 million people are supplied by public supply, 107 million are supplied by groundwater and 162...

In regions where water resources are scarce and in high demand, it is important to safeguard against contamination of groundwater aquifers by oil-field fluids (water, gas, oil). In this context, the geochemical characterisation of these fluids is critical so that anthropogenic contaminants can be readily identified. The first step is characterising pre-development geochemical fluid...

Groundwater total dissolved solids (TDS) distribution was mapped with a three-dimensional (3D) model, and it was found that TDS variability is largely controlled by stratigraphy and geologic structure. General TDS patterns in the San Joaquin Valley of California (USA) are attributed to predominantly connate water composition and large-scale recharge from the adjacent Sierra Nevada...

Water-Quality in San Francisco Bay The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) monitors water quality and suspended-sediment transport in the San Francisco Bay (Bay) as part of a multi-agency effort to address estuary management, water supply, and ecological concerns. The San Francisco Bay area is home to millions of people, and the Bay teems with marine and terrestrial flora and fauna. Freshwater...

In May of 2019, Loch Lomond Reservoir was surveyed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the city of Santa Cruz to assess the current storage capacity and sedimentation rates in the reservoir. Survey methods combined sonar soundings to measure bathymetry and lidar scans with GPS data to measure near-shore topography and sediment bed samples to understand reservoir bed...

Ecosystem metabolism is a key ecological attribute and easy to describe, but quantifying metabolism in estuaries is challenging. Properly scaling measurements through time and space requires consideration of hydrodynamics and mixing water from heterogeneous sources, making any estimation uncertain. Here, we compared three methods for modeling ecosystem metabolism in a portion of the...

While growth history of vegetation within upland systems is well studied, plant phenology within coastal tidal systems is less understood. Landscape-scale, satellite-derived indicators of plant greenness may not adequately represent seasonality of vegetation biomass and productivity within tidal wetlands due to limitations of cloud cover, satellite temporal frequency and attenu-ation of...

The travel time or “age” of groundwater affects catchment responses to hydrologic changes, geochemical reactions, and time lags between management actions and responses at down-gradient streams and wells. Use of atmospheric tracers has facilitated the characterization of groundwater ages, but most wells lack such measurements. This study applied machine learning to predict ages in wells...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), has constructed a new spatially detailed Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) model for the Merced River Basin, California, which is a tributary of the San Joaquin River in California. Operated through an Object User Interface (OUI) with Ensemble Streamflow Prediction (ESP) and...