Publications

No abstract available.

Wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent-dominated streams provide critical habitat for aquatic and terrestrial organisms but also continually expose them to complex mixtures of pharmaceuticals that can potentially impair growth, behavior, and reproduction. Currently, few biomarkers are available that relate to pharmaceutical-specific mechanisms of action. In the experiment reported in...

Total phosphorus (TP) loads in many rivers in the north-central United States have increased, including the Illinois River at Valley City, Illinois, USA, which increased 39% from the periods 1989–1996 to 2015–2019 despite efforts to reduce loads from point and nonpoint sources. Here, we quantify long-term variations in phosphorus (P) loads in the Illinois River and its tributaries and...

The connection of rivers with their floodplains has been greatly reduced in agricultural drainage basins, especially in the Upper Mississippi River Basin. The restriction of the Mississippi River from its floodplain has reduced the sediment trapping and nutrient deposition capabilities of the floodplain, exacerbating water quality problems in the river and in downstream waterbodies. A...

The Federal Interagency Sedimentation Project (FISP) standardizes and advances sediment science among federal agencies. It is important to ensure that the FISP bag samplers perform isokinetically under all tested and approved conditions and collect samples that are representative of the stream or river cross-section. A measure of a sampler’s isokinetic behavior is its intake efficiency...

The root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) are widely used metrics for evaluating models. Yet, there remains enduring confusion over their use, such that a standard practice is to present both, leaving it to the reader to decide which is more relevant. In a recent reprise to the 200-year debate over their use, Willmott and Matsuura (2005) and Chai and Draxler (2014)...

Ratings are used for a variety of reasons in water-resources investigations. The simplest rating relates discharge to the stage of the river. From a pure hydrodynamics perspective, all rivers and streams have some form of hysteresis in the relation between stage and discharge because of unsteady flow as a flood wave passes. Simple ratings are unable to represent hysteresis in a stage...

Groundwater-quality data collected from 1997 through 2018 from 68 monitoring locations open to the Missouri River alluvial aquifer (hereafter referred to as the “alluvial aquifer”) near the Independence, Missouri, well field were analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the City of Independence, Missouri. This analysis was done to assess the quality of the water in the...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Central Midwest Water Science Center (CMWSC) includes three States—Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. USGS water science centers across the Nation provide information on water resources including streamflow, water use, water availability, and the quality of surface water and groundwater (https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources). The USGS CMWSC...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operates many streamgages throughout the country that provide historical and real-time daily streamflow information. Accurate estimates of daily streamflow and the percentage of time that a certain volume of streamflow occurs or is exceeded in a stream is crucial information for structure design and other activities conducted by federal, state, and local...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, monitors stations designed for the Ambient Water-Quality Monitoring Network, a collection of stations that monitor streams and springs in Missouri. During water year 2020 (October 1, 2019, through September 30, 2020), the U.S. Geological Survey collected water-quality data at 72 stations: 70...

Monitoring discharge in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is critical for the accounting done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of the diversion of water from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River Basin by the State of Illinois. The primary streamgage used for this discharge monitoring, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Lemont, Illinois (U.S. Geological Survey station...