Hydrology

The USGS collaborated with the Miccosukee and Seminole Tribes to co-design a dashboard mock-up for a real-time web application that monitors tree island health in the Everglades.

To sustain economic and ecologically viable ecosystems into the future, USGS is developing freshwater delivery targets for water flowing southward into Everglades National Park by integrating climate and sea level projections, hydrologic modeling, and ecological modeling to forecast ecosystem responses to future freshwater availability scenarios.

Researchers are investigating beach compaction, the incubation environment for turtle nests, and shorebird nest abundance at beaches throughout the southeastern United States to better understand the impacts of beach compaction to nesting turtles and foraging seabirds.

The USGS Joint Ecosystem Modeling team will work with partners to identify and develop decision support tools for Everglades water management.

USGS researchers will collect data on salinity, water level, and flooding duration within Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge to improve the understanding of the hydrologic system, and how hydrology drives available red-cockaded woodpecker habitat use and availability across the landscape.

USGS will monitor hydrologic and marsh conditions at the Turtle Bayou mitigation area. This effort will help provide a long-term water level dataset for Turtle Bayou.

USGS researchers will examine how hydrology and landscape vegetation changes impact Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow survival and population growth.

USGS will compare the EverForecast hydrologic forecast, the South Florida Water Management District's Position Analysis, and observed water level recordings from gages located across the Everglades landscape to examine which forecast performs better during the wet and dry seasons; wet, dry, or average years; or in different areas of the Everglades.

The USGS Utah Water Science Center and the State of Utah collaborated with WARC's Advanced Applications Team to build a data driven, interactive web application to provide groundwater conditions for Utah.

The Joint Ecosystem Modeling team will be running a suite of ecological models to evaluate scenarios and provide insight into how alternative restorations plans compare, indicate whether alternatives could lead to unintended consequences, and determine effects of alternatives that could conflict with other goals.

In the summer of 2021, instrumented platforms were deployed at Seven Mile Island Living Laboratory, New Jersey to conduct time series measurements of tidal velocity, turbidity, surface elevation, sediment concentration, and suspended sediment characteristics. The collected data will be used to provide decision support to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as they plan dredging activities in the Gulf...

WARC researchers partnered with Gulf Sturgeon decision makers and biologists to develop a Bayesian network model that uses habitat characteristics to predict the quantity of juvenile winter foraging habitat under alternative river discharge and timing of juvenile arrival scenarios.