Publications

Invasive annual grasses can promote ecosystem state changes and habitat loss in the American Southwest. Non-native annual grasses such as Bromus spp. and Schismus spp. have invaded the Mojave Desert and degraded habitat through increased fire occurrence, severity, and shifting plant community composition. Thus, it is important to identify and characterize the areas where persistent...

Sinkholes in karst and pseudokarst regions threaten infrastructure, property, and lives. We mapped closed depressions in karst and pseudokarst regions of the conterminous United States (U.S.) from 10-m-resolution elevation data using high-performance computing, and then created a heuristic additive model of sinkhole susceptibility that also included nationally consistent data for factors...

Reducing the potential for loss of life from local tsunamis is challenging for emergency managers given the need for self-protective behavior of at-risk individuals within brief windows of time to evacuate. There has been considerable attention paid to discussing the use of tsunami vertical-evacuation structures for areas where there may be insufficient time to evacuate. This strategy...

Demand for food and water are increasing while the extent of arable land and accessible fresh water are decreasing. This poses global challenges as economies continue to develop and the population grows. With agriculture as the leading consumer of water, better understanding how water is used to produce food may help support the increase of Crop Water Productivity (CWP; kg/m3), the ratio...

Context Engaging stakeholders in research is needed for many of the sustainability challenges that landscape ecologists address. Involving stakeholders’ perspectives through narratives in participatory modeling fosters better understanding of the problem and evaluation of the acceptability of tradeoffs and creates buy-in for management actions. However, stakeholder-driven inputs often...

Riparian systems across the Southwest United States are extremely valuable for the human and ecological communities that engage with them. However, they have experienced substantial changes and stresses over the past century, including non-native vegetation expansion, vegetation die-offs, and increased fire activity. Vegetation management approaches, such as ecological restoration, may...

An increasing number of wildfire disasters have occurred in recent years in the United States. Here we demonstrate that cumulative primary human exposure—the population residing within the perimeters of large wildfires—was 594,850 people from 2000 to 2019 across the contiguous United States (CONUS), 82% of which occurred in the western United States. Primary population exposure increased...

Biogeographic history can set initial conditions for vegetation community assemblages that determine their climate responses at broad extents that land surface models attempt to forecast. Numerous studies have indicated that evolutionarily conserved biochemical, structural, and other functional attributes of plant species are captured in visible-to-short wavelength infrared, 400 to 2,500...

Surveys are important tools in business resilience and recovery research because of their ability to capture disaggregated economic information; however, they can be difficult and costly due to business operational dynamics and the larger challenges of disaster research. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a recent example where demand for business data was high across both research and...

Landslide susceptibility maps indicate the spatial distribution of landslide likelihood. Modeling susceptibility over large or diverse terrains remains a challenge due to the sparsity of landslide data (mapped extent of known landslides) and the variability in triggering conditions. Several different data sampling strategies of landslide locations used to train a susceptibility model are...

The U.S. Geological Survey Community for Data Integration annually supports small projects focusing on data integration for interdisciplinary research, innovative data management, and demonstration of new technologies. This report provides a summary of the 14 projects supported in fiscal year 2019 and outlines their goals, activities, and accomplishments. Proposals in 2019 were...

Many households lack the necessary food and water supplies to sustain themselves for more than three days during a disaster. Community vulnerability assessments can be used to identify households with more pressing needs for emergency food and water resources. It is critical that these assessments include the interaction between physical impacts to lifeline infrastructure and the social