Publications
Browse more than 160,000 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.
Mission Area Publications
Mission Area Publications
We are focused on some of the most significant issues society faces, and our science is making a substantial contribution to the well-being of the Nation and the world. Learn more about the major topics our research covers and the programs focused on those topics.
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The evolution of glandularity as a defense against herbivores in the tarweed clade
PremiseGlandular trichomes are implicated in direct and indirect defense of plants. However, the degree to which glandular and non-glandular trichomes have evolved as a consequence of herbivory remains unclear, because their heritability, their association with herbivore resistance, their trade-offs with one another, and their association with other functions are rarely quantified.MethodsWe conduc
Authors
Ian Pearse, Eric LoPresti, Bruce Baldwin, Billy Krimmel
Multi-criteria decision approach for climate adaptation of cultural resources along the Atlantic coast of the southeastern United States: Application of AHP method
Prioritizing climate adaptation actions is often made difficult by stakeholders and decision-makers having multiple objectives, some of which may be competing. Transparent, transferable, and objective methods are needed to assess and weight different objectives for complex decisions with multiple interests. In this study, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to examine priorities in manag
Authors
Abu SMG Kibria, Erin Seekamp, Xiao Xiao, Soupy Dalyander, Mitchell Eaton
Prioritizing river basins for nutrient studies
Increases in fluxes of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the environment have led to negative impacts affecting drinking water, eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Because of the importance, scale, and complexity of these issues, it may be useful to consider methods for prioritizing nutrient research in representative drainage basins within a regional or n
Authors
Anthony J. Tesoriero, Dale M. Robertson, Christopher Green, John K. Böhlke, Judson Harvey, Sharon L. Qi
Guide to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) sampling within Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are synthetic chemicals with a nondegradable fluorinated carbon backbone that have been incorporated in countless industrial and commercial applications. Because PFAS are nondegradable, they have been detected in all environmental media, indicating extensive global contamination. The unique physiochemical properties of PFAS and their complex interactions
Authors
Erin L. Pulster, Sarah R. Bowman, Landon Keele, Jeffery Steevens
Examining water and proppant demand, and produced water production, associated with petroleum resource development in the Eagle Ford Group, Texas
More than 20,000 horizontal wells have been drilled and hydraulically fractured in the Eagle Ford Group since the discovery well in 2008, but a considerable amount of undiscovered petroleum remains. Recently, drilled wells have been hydraulically fractured with an average of nearly 13 million gallons of water and 16 million lb of sand, yielding a million or more gallons of produced water. To infor
Authors
Nicholas J. Gianoutsos, Seth S. Haines, Brian A. Varela, Katherine J. Whidden
Rayleigh step-selection functions and connections to continuous-time mechanistic movement models
BackgroundThe process known as ecological diffusion emerges from a first principles view of animal movement, but ecological diffusion and other partial differential equation models can be difficult to fit to data. Step-selection functions (SSFs), on the other hand, have emerged as powerful practical tools for ecologists studying the movement and habitat selection of animals.MethodsSSFs typically i
Authors
Joseph Michael Eisaguirre, Perry J. Williams, Mevin B. Hooten
Hydrothermal plume fallout, mass wasting, and volcanic eruptions contribute to sediments at Loki’s Castle vent field, Mohns Ridge
Sediments surrounding hydrothermal vents are important transition spaces between hydrothermal and pelagic environments. These sediments accumulate through diverse processes that include water column plume fallout, volcanic ash deposition, and mass wasting of hydrothermal chimneys and mounds superimposed upon background sedimentation which may originate from pelagic, terrestrial, and volcanic sourc
Authors
Amy Gartman, Denise M Payan, Manda Viola Au, Eoghan P. Reeves, John Jamieson, Caroline Gini, Desiree Roerdink
Long-term storage at -20°C compromises fatty acid composition of polar bear adipose biopsies
This study aimed to gain insight into the influence of storage time and temperature on fatty acid (FA) signatures of biopsies of marine mammal adipose/blubber tissues. To examine storage effects, biopsy-type slices from larger pieces of adipose tissues from 2 polar bears Ursus maritimus were stored at either -20 or -80°C and subsequently analyzed for fatty acid composition initially (before storag
Authors
Rose Lacombe, Todd C. Atwood, Elizabeth Peacock, Anais Remili, Rune Dietz, Christian Sonne, Melissa McKinney
The spatially adaptable filter for error reduction (SAFER) process: Remote sensing-based LANDFIRE disturbance mapping updates
LANDFIRE (LF) has been producing periodic spatially explicit vegetation change maps (i.e., LF disturbance products) across the entire United States since 1999 at a 30 m spatial resolution. These disturbance products include data products produced by various fire programs, field-mapped vegetation and fuel treatment activity (i.e., events) submissions from various agencies, and disturbances detected
Authors
Sanath Sathyachandran Kumar, Brian Tolk, Ray Dittmeier, Joshua J. Picotte, Inga P. La Puma, Birgit Peterson, Timothy Duckett Hatten
Transglobal spread of an ecologically relevant sea urchin parasite
Mass mortality of the dominant coral reef herbivore Diadema antillarum in the Caribbean in the early 1980s contributed to a persistent phase shift from coral- to algal-dominated reefs. In 2022, a scuticociliate most closely related to Philaster apodigitiformis caused further mass mortality of D. antillarum across the Caribbean, leading to >95% mortality at affected sites. Mortality was also report
Authors
Isabella T. Ritchie, Brayan Vilanova-Cuevas, Ashley Altera, Kaileigh Cornfield, Ceri Evans, James S. Evans, Maria Hopson-Fernandes, Christina A. Kellogg, Elayne Looker, Oliver Taylor, Ian Hewson, Mya Breitbart
An introduction to Criteria for Reporting and Evaluating Exposure Datasets (CREED) for use in environmental assessments
Risks posed by environmental exposure to chemicals are routinely assessed to inform activities ranging from environmental status reporting to authorization and registration of chemicals for commercial uses. Environmental risk assessment generally relies on two key values generated from exposure data and ecotoxicity data. Data sets of measured concentrations of chemicals in environmental matrices,
Authors
Graham Merrington, Lisa H. Nowell, Charles Peck
Assessing the probability of grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) spawning in the Sandusky River using discharge and water temperature
Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella, Val.) is an invasive species in the Laurentian Great Lakes region with the potential for damaging the lake ecosystem and harming the region's economy. Grass carp spawning was documented in the Sandusky River, Ohio, in 2015 through targeted egg sampling. Continued egg sampling in the Sandusky River suggested that grass carp spawning is related to discharge and w
Authors
Sabrina Jaffe, Song S. Qian, Christine M. Mayer, Patrick M. Kočovský, Anarita Gouveia