Publications

Volumes of data illustrate the severity of the crisis affecting amphibians, where > 32% of amphibians worldwide are threatened with declining populations. Although there have been isolated victories, the current approach to the issue is unsuccessful. We suggest that a radically different approach, something akin to human emergency response management (i.e. the Incident Command System)...

The deserts of California (Lead photo, Fig. 1) occupy approximately 38% of California’s landscape (Table 1) and consist of three distinct deserts: the Great Basin Desert, Mojave Desert, and Colorado Desert, the latter of which is a subdivision of the Sonoran Desert (Brown and Lowe 1980). The wide range of climates and geology found within each of these deserts result in very different...

Existing studies on the impacts of climate change on groundwater recharge are either global or basin/location-specific. The global studies lack the specificity to inform decision making, while the local studies do little to clarify potential changes over large regions (major river basins, states, or groups of states), a scale often important in the development of water policy. An...

Permeability is the primary control on fluid flow in the Earth’s crust and is key to a surprisingly wide range of geological processes, because it controls the advection of heat and solutes and the generation of anomalous pore pressures. The practical importance of permeability – and the potential for large, dynamic changes in permeability – is highlighted by ongoing issues associated...

In the past, hydrologic modeling of surface water resources has mainly focused on simulating the hydrologic cycle at local to regional catchment modeling domains. There now exists a level of maturity among the catchment, global water security, and land surface modeling communities such that these communities are converging toward continental domain hydrologic models. This commentary...

Four workshops held in 2013–2014 at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis brought together university, government, and insurance industry scientists from countries that straddle plate boundaries and those in plate interiors. Participants were invited; the workshops’ goals involved developing tests of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis...

Bi-annual newsletter for the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, covering news through July of 2015

A major goal of microbial ecology is to identify links between microbial community structure and microbial processes. Although this objective seems straightforward, there are conceptual and methodological challenges to designing studies that explicitly evaluate this link. Here, we analyzed literature documenting structure and process responses to manipulations to determine the frequency...

Analytical tools are needed in riverine science and management to bridge the gap between GIS and statistical packages that were not designed for the directional and dendritic structure of streams. We introduce linbin, an R package developed for the analysis of riverscapes at multiple scales. With this software, riverine data on aquatic habitat and species distribution can be scaled and...

Myriad field, laboratory, and modeling studies show that nutrient availability plays a fundamental role in regulating CO2 exchange between the Earth's biosphere and atmosphere, and in determining how carbon pools and fluxes respond to climatic change. Accordingly, global models that incorporate coupled climate–carbon cycle feedbacks made a significant advance with the introduction of a...

An unprecedented increase in earthquakes in the U.S. mid-continent began in 2009. Many of these earthquakes have been documented as induced by wastewater injection. We examine the relationship between wastewater injection and U.S. mid-continent seismicity using a newly assembled injection well database for the central and eastern United States. We find that the entire increase in...

Forty years ago, the demolition of large dams was mostly fiction, notably plotted in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Its 1975 publication roughly coincided with the end of large-dam construction in the United States. Since then, dams have been taken down in increasing numbers as they have filled with sediment, become unsafe or inefficient, or otherwise outlived their...