Publications

The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project (SBSPRP) encompasses over 6,000 hectares of former salt production ponds along the south edge of the San Francisco Bay and represents the largest wetland restoration effort on the west coast of North America. A series of studies associated with Phase 1 (2010–2018) restoration activities that are focused on a historically mercury contaminated...

Renewed interest in nearshore oil exploration and production in the shallow waters of the Central Beaufort Sea Shelf has created a need to advance our understanding of the past, current, and future atmospheric and oceanographic conditions that affect existing and planned infrastructure and nearshore ecosystems. At the time of writing this report, Hilcorp Alaska LLC has received BOEM...

We determine optimal on‐fault earthquake spatial distributions using a combinatorial method that minimizes the long‐term cumulative stress resolved on the fault. An integer‐programming framework was previously developed to determine the optimal arrangement of a millennia‐scale earthquake sample that minimizes the misfit to a target slip rate determined from geodetic data. The resulting...

Terrestrial sediment discharging from watersheds off West Maui, Hawaiʻi, has been documented as a primary stressor to local coral reefs, causing coral reef health to decline. The U.S. Geological Survey acquired and analyzed physical oceanographic and sedimentologic field data off the coast of West Maui to calibrate and validate physics-based, numerical hydrodynamic and sediment transport...

A high-resolution multibeam survey from a portion of the San Simeon Channel (offshore Morro Bay, California) captured a zone of recurring troughs and ridges adjacent to prominent submarine meander bends. Through an integrated study using surveying data, sediment core analysis, radiocarbon dating, and stable isotope measurements, we hypothesize that turbidity current event frequency was...

Satellite data are revolutionizing coastal science. A study revealing how the El Niño/Southern Oscillation impacts coastal erosion around the Pacific Rim shows what is possible.

Measuring river response to dam removal affords a rare, important opportunity to study fluvial response to sediment pulses on a large field scale. We present a before–after/control–impact study of the Carmel River, California, measuring fluvial geomorphic and grain-size evolution over 8 years, six of which postdated removal of a 32 m-high dam (one of the largest dams removed worldwide)...

Increasing wildfire and declining snowpacks in mountain regions threaten water availability. We combine satellite-based fire detections with snow seasonality classifications to examine fire activity in California’s seasonal and ephemeral snow zones. We find a nearly tenfold increase in fire activity during 2020-2021 versus 2001-2019. Accumulation season broadband snow albedo declined 25...

A submerged, low-relief nearshore berm was constructed in the Pacific Ocean near the mouth of the Columbia River, USA, using 216,000 m3 of sediment dredged from the adjacent navigation channel. The material dredged from the navigation channel was placed on the northern flank of the ebb-tidal delta in water depths between 12 and 15 m and created a distinct feature that could be tracked...

Renewed interest in nearshore oil exploration and production in the shallow waters of the Central Beaufort Sea Shelf has created a need to advance our understanding of the past, current, and future atmospheric and oceanographic conditions that affect existing and planned infrastructure and nearshore ecosystems. At the time of writing this report, Hilcorp Alaska, LLC, has received BOEM...

Coastal flooding takes many forms, ranging from major flooding associated with storms to minor flooding associated with exceptionally high tides and other oceanic and atmospheric phenomena on storm-free days. A major societal challenge is to understand and predict how flood magnitude and frequency will manifest at particular places and times, now and in the future. Of particular interest...

The world’s coastlines are spatially highly variable, coupled-human-natural systems that comprise a nested hierarchy of component landforms, ecosystems, and human interventions, each interacting over a range of space and time scales. Understanding and predicting coastline dynamics necessitates frequent observation from imaging sensors on remote sensing platforms. Machine Learning models...