Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center
Publications
Browse more than 150,000 publications authored by our scientists over the past 100+ year history of the USGS. Publications available are: USGS-authored journal articles, series reports, book chapters, other government publications, and more.
Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center Publications
Using small unmanned aircraft systems for measuring post-flood high-water marks and streambed elevations
Floods affected approximately two billion people around the world from 1998–2017, causing over 142,000 fatalities and over 656 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses. Flood data, such as the extent of inundation and peak flood stage, are needed to define the environmental, economic, and social impacts of significant flood events. Ground-based...
Forbes, Brandon T.; DeBenedetto, Geoffrey; Dickinson, Jesse E.; Bunch, Claire; Fitzpatrick, Faith A. Cooperatively improving tallgrass prairie with adaptive management
Adaptive management (AM) is widely recommended as an approach for learning to improve resource management, but successful AM projects remain relatively uncommon, with few documented examples applied by natural resource management agencies. We used AM to make recommendations for the management of native tallgrass prairie plant communities in...
Ahlering, Marissa; Carlson, Daren; Vacek, Sara; Jacobi, Sarah; Hunt, Vicky; Stanton, J.C.; Knutson, Melinda G.; Lonsdorf, Eric V. Evidence for a growing population of eastern migratory monarch butterflies is currently insufficient
The eastern migratory population of monarch butterflies has experienced a multi-decadal decline, but a recent increase in abundance (to 6.05 ha in winter 2018) has led some observers to question whether the population has reversed its long-standing decline and embarked on a trajectory of increasing abundance. We examined this possibility through...
Thogmartin, Wayne E.; Szymanski, Jennifer A; Weiser, Emily L. Phosphorus, nitrogen and dissolved organic carbon fluxes from sediments in freshwater rivermouths entering Green Bay (Lake Michigan; USA)
Transitional areas between ecosystem types are often active biogeochemically due to resource limitation changes. Lotic-to-lentic transitions in freshwaters appear active biogeochemically, but few studies have directly measured nutrient processing rates to assess whether processing within the rivermouth is important for load estimates or the local...
Larson, James H.; James, William F.; Fitzpatrick, Faith A.; Frost, Paul C.; Evans, Mary Anne; Reneau, Paul C.; Xenopoulos, Marguerite A. Challenges for leveraging citizen science to support statistically robust monitoring programs
Large samples and long time series are often needed for effective broad-scale monitoring of status and trends in wild populations. Obtaining those sample sizes can be more feasible when volunteers contribute to the dataset, but volunteer-selected sites are not always representative of a population. Previous work to account for biased site...
Weiser, Emily L.; Diffendorfer, James E.; Lopez-Hoffman, Laura; Semmens, Darius J.; Thogmartin, Wayne E. Acute toxicity of the lampricides TFM and niclosamide: Effects on a vascular plant and a chironomid species
The lampricides 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol (TFM) and niclosamide have been used for about 60 years to control sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) in the Great Lakes Basin and Lake Champlain. To register these chemicals as pesticides in North America, their environmental effects must be reviewed on a periodic basis. As a part of this effort,...
Leak, Tom; Aufderheide, John; Bergfield, Alan; Hubert, Terrance D.
Remnant hardwood forest mapping within the Upper Mississippi River Floodplain
Executive SummaryThe primary objective of the project was to locate previously unknown stands of mast-producing hardwood forest trees in the Upper Mississippi River floodplain using existing information. We located and mapped 399 previously unknown hardwood forest stands within the Mississippi River floodplain area of navigation pools 9, 10, and...
Hanson, Jenny L.; King, Rich; Hoy, Erin E. Influence of a high-head dam as a dispersal barrier to fish community structure of the Upper Mississippi River
In river systems, high‐head dams may increase the distance‐decay of fish community similarity by creating nearly impermeable dispersal barriers to certain species from upstream reaches. Substantial evidence suggests that migratory species are impacted by dams, and most previous studies in stream/river networks have focused on small streams and...
Anderson, Rebekah L.; Anderson, Cory A.; Larson, James H.; Knights, Brent C.; Vallazza, Jon; Jenkins, Sean E.; Lamer, James T. Light exposure along particle flowpaths in large rivers
Sunlight is a critical resource in aquatic systems driving photosynthesis, photodegradation of organic matter and contaminants, animal behavior, and the activity of human pathogens. In rivers, solutes, materials, and organisms are turbulently mixed across the water column during downstream transport and exposed to highly variable sunlight. However...
Gardner, John R.; Ensign, Scott H.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; Doyle, Martin W. Off-channel waterbodies in the Middle Mississippi River: A pilot investigation
Off-channel and floodplain water bodies are important components of large river ecosystems while rare within the Middle Mississippi River. The lack of these habitats likely influences water quality, nutrient processing, and communities of organisms. In early 2016 a major flood event breached two levees south of Cape Girardeau, MO resulting in the...
Sobotka, Molly; West, John
A hydrogeomorphic classification of connectivity of large rivers of the Upper Midwest, United States
River connectivity is defined as the water-mediated exchange of matter, energy, and biota between different elements of the riverine landscape. Connectivity is an especially important concept in large-river corridors (channel plus floodplain ) because large rivers integrate fluxes of water, sediment, nutrients, contaminants, and other transported...
Jacobson, Robert B.; Rohweder, Jason J.; De Jager, Nathan R.
Assessment of uncontained Zequanox applications for zebra mussel control in a Midwestern lake
Zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) are invasive bivalves that have perturbed aquatic ecosystems within North America since their introduction in the mid-1980s. Control of zebra mussels has largely been restricted to raw water conveyance systems and associated infrastructures because few control products are registered for application in surface...
Luoma, James A.; Waller, Diane L.; Severson, Todd J.; Barbour, Matthew T.; Wise, Jeremy K.; Lord, Eric G.; Bartsch, Michelle R.; Bartsch, Lynn A.