Publications

Information concerning the availability, use, and quality of water in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, is critical for proper water-supply management. The purpose of this fact sheet is to present information that can be used by water managers, parish residents, and others for stewardship of this vital resource. In 2014, 109.84 million gallons per day (Mgal/d) of water were withdrawn in...

For decades, botanists have recognized that rare plants are clustered into ecological “islands”: small and isolated habitat patches produced by landscape features such as sinkholes and bedrock outcrops. Insular ecosystems often provide unusually stressful microhabitats for plant growth (eg because of thin soils, high temperatures, extreme pH, or limited nutrients) to which rare species...

The Mississippi Delta, located in northwest Mississippi, is an area dense with industrial-level agriculture sustained by groundwater-dependent irrigation supplied by the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial aquifer (alluvial aquifer). The Delta provides agricultural commodities across the United States and around the world. Observed declines in groundwater altitudes and streamflow...

For many people, a visit to a cave is a wondrous event directing our minds to ponder the mysteries presented by these unique places and inspiring questions: How old is the cave? What was the role of water in forming the cave and where did the water come from? How is the cave connected to the surface environment? These are intriguing questions to ask, and karst scientists use isotope...

This report presents revised results for four parameters reported for suspended-sediment samples that were collected in the lower Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin as part of a cooperative program between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Mississippi Valley Division, New Orleans District and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The cooperative program has been active since 1973 at seven...

Flood-inundation maps for a 14.5-mile reach of the Amite River and a 20.2-mile reach of the Comite River from State Highway 64 to U.S. Highway 190 were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the City of Central, Louisiana. These maps, which can be accessed through an interactive mapper at the USGS Flood Inundation Mapping Program website and from a companion...

To better understand the effects of hydrologic alteration as they relate to human and biological needs within the Mississippi Alluvial Plain of the south-central United States, the quantification of hydrologic alteration is required. Quantifying hydrologic alteration in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain is particularly difficult because of the lack of current reference, or even relatively...

We evaluated whether SPAtially Referenced Regression On Watershed attributes (SPARROW) models calibrated for two adjacent USA regions could be applied at the local scale to support management decisions for streams in Tennessee. Nutrient-source apportionment of load is important for this local-scale application and demands careful consideration of uncertainty in the calibrated...

Submerged macrophyte habitats provide significant benefits to estuarine systems. In southeast Louisiana, Myriophyllum spicatum L. (milfoil) and Ruppia maritima L. (widgeongrass) are dominant species existing across fresh to brackish areas. Though frequently co-occurring across the range of salinity and light conditions, their individual responses to changing environmental conditions from

In large, alluvial floodplains dominated by agriculture, small streams have the potential to experience nutrient enrichment affecting algal assemblage structure and metabolism. Nutrient enrichment is largely driven by application of nutrients and altered hydrologic regimes. To inform stressor–response-based nutrient reduction goals for agricultural alluvial plain streams, diatom...

Tracking changes in stream nutrient inputs to Lake Erie over multidecadal time scales depends on the use of statistical methods that can remove the influence of year-to-year variability of streamflow but also explicitly consider the influence of long-term trends in streamflow. The methods introduced in this paper include an extended version of Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and...