Publications

The Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative (ARMI) began in 2000 as an attempt by the United States Geological Survey to determine the status and trends of amphibians on federal lands in the United States and its territories. ARMI research focuses on determining causes of declines, if observed, developing new techniques to sample populations and analyze data, and disseminating...

Communications during fire events are complex. Nevertheless, training fire information officers to plan fire communications before events, and to communicate during fires in a way that accurately and promptly informs residents in fire-affected areas, can increase effectiveness, reduce anxiety, ensure residents have accurate information on which to act, help them make better decisions...

In June 2004 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), with support from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), held a three-day symposium on the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in Fort Collins, Colorado. These proceedings contain papers by most of those who made presentations at the symposium, but some were unable to provide written papers. This shortcoming has been...

The primary objectives of this evaluation were to improve the performance of the Whooping Crane Habitat Suitability model (C4R) used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) for defining the relationship between river discharge and habitat availability, and to assist the Service in implementing improved model(s) with existing hydraulic files. The C4R habitat model is applied at...

Blossom is an R package with functions for making statistical comparisons with distance-function based permutation tests developed by P.W. Mielke, Jr. and colleagues at Colorado State University (Mielke and Berry, 2001) and for testing parameters estimated in linear models with permutation procedures developed by B. S. Cade and colleagues at the Fort Collins Science Center, U.S...

Historically, the Colorado River was one of the most formidable rivers in the world. Each spring, melting snow from the mountains scoured the desert landscape moving millions of tons of sediment to the sea. The Grand Canyon lays testament to its erosive nature. Summer heat would bring seasonal droughts, reducing the river to a trickle impacting humans, animals, and fish. Isolated by high...

In the August 2005 feature article, “Tiff over Tamarisk: Can a Nuisance Be Nice, Too?” the author raises several issues about which there is currently scientific debate, and presents some of the differing perspectives. A phenomenon surrounding discussions of tamarisk in the West is revealed and reinforced in the article—the polarized nature of the debate. Over the years, this...

No abstract available.

The downstream effects of dams on riparian forests are strongly mediated by the character and magnitude of adjustment of the fluvial–geomorphic system. To examine the effects of flow regulation on sand-bed streams in eastern Colorado, we studied the riparian forest on three river segments, the dam-regulated South Fork Republican River downstream of Bonny Dam, the unregulated South Fork...

Natural resource negotiation often involves multiple parties with overlapping interests and issues that can provide opportunities for mutually beneficial solutions. These opportunities can be missed, however, if negotiators are unable to comprehend the facts of a negotiation, understand the interests of other parties, or accurately evaluate the options that increase the size of the...

The Rocky Mountain Region of the United States Geological Survey's Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative is conducting monitoring of the status of amphibians on a transect that extends along the Continental Divide from Canada to Colorado and comprises four National Parks. Monitoring uses visual encounter surveys to determine site occupancy, with multiple visits to a subset of...

Recent attention has focused on resource management initiatives at the watershed scale with emphasis on collaborative, locally driven, and decentralized institutional arrangements. Existing literature on limited selections of well-established watershed-based organizations has provided valuable insights. The current research extends this focus by including a broad survey of watershed...