Publications

Light-absorbing particles in atmospheric dust deposited on snow cover (dust-on-snow, DOS) diminish albedo and accelerate the timing and rate of snow melt. Identification of these particles and their effects are relevant to snow-radiation modeling and thus water-resource management. Laboratory-measured reflectance of DOS samples from the San Juan Mountains (USA) were compared with DOS...

Human activity influences wildlife. However, the ecological and conservation significances of these influences are difficult to predict and depend on their population‐level consequences. This difficulty arises partly because of information gaps, and partly because the data on stressors are usually collected in a count‐based manner (e.g., number of dead animals) that is difficult to...

Part of the spatial variation in the apparent sea-level record of the last interglacial (LIG) period is due to the diverse response of coastlines to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) processes, particularly where coastlines were close to the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the past two glacial periods. We tested modeled LIG paleo-sea levels on New Providence Island (NPI), Bahamas and...

The Delmarva Peninsula in the eastern United States is dominated by thousands of small, forested depressional wetlands that are highly sensitive to climate change and climate variability but provide critical ecosystem services. Due to the relatively small size of these depressional wetlands and occurrence under forest canopy cover, it is very challenging to map their inundation status...

The Dixie Valley fault bounds the east side of the Stillwater Range in west‐central Nevada and last ruptured in 1954. Offset basalts indicate that slip began more recently than ~14 Ma, and prior work has interpreted the southern segment as an active low‐angle normal fault. Oligocene igneous rocks in the southern Stillwater Range were steeply tilted during large‐magnitude extension prior...

The Gales Creek fault (GCF) is a 60-km-long, northwest-striking dextral fault system (west of Portland, Oregon) that accommodates northward motion and uplift of the Oregon Coast Range. New geologic mapping and geophysical models confirm inferred offsets from earlier geophysical surveys and document ∼12 km of right-lateral offset of a basement high in Eocene Siletz River Volcanics since...

Transform faults are known to have anomalously low rates of seismicity, but no direct observations reveal why this is the case. We use new, autonomous underwater vehicle high-resolution seafloor mapping to image the morphology of and offsets along transform fault segments in the Gulf of California. Fault splays display a varied history of activation and deactivation of individual fault...

The selective use of seasonal precipitation by vegetation is critical to understanding the residence time and flow path of water in watersheds, yet there are limited datasets to test how climate alters these dynamics. Here, we use measurements of the seasonal cycle of tree ring 18O for two widespread conifer species in the Rocky Mountains of North America to provide a multi-decadal...

Reversing the ongoing degradation of the planet's ecosystems requires timely and detailed monitoring of ecosystem change and uses. Yet, the System of National Accounts (SNA), first developed in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s and used by statistical offices worldwide to record economic activity (for example, production, consumption, and asset accumulation), does not make...

Integrated, multi-method provenance studies of siliciclastic sedimentary deposits are increasingly used to reconstruct the history of source-to-sink transport, paleogeography, and tectonics. Invariably, analysis of large-scale depositional systems must confront issues regarding how to best sample the system and adequately cope with the details of sediment mixing. Potential biases...

Wildfires, especially those of large size, worsen air quality and alter the carbon cycle through combustion of large quantities of biomass and release of carbon into the atmosphere. The Black Dragon fire, which occurred in 1987 in the boreal forests of China is among the top five of such megafires ever recorded in the world. With over 30 years of accumulation of data and availability of...

The Paleocene–Eocene strata of the rapidly subsiding Hanna Basin give insights in sedimentation patterns and regional paleogeography during the Laramide orogeny and across the climatic event at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Abundant coalbeds and carbonaceous shales of the fluvial, paludal, and lacustrine strata of the Hanna Formation offer a different depositional setting...