Ecosystems Science at USGS
Ecosystems Science at USGS
USGS Landscape Science Strategy
USGS Landscape Science Strategy
Science informing decision making on public lands and across all of our Nation’s landscapes.
Science informing decision making on public lands and across all of our Nation’s landscapes.
USGS Wildland Fire Science
USGS Wildland Fire Science
USGS science helps understand the causes, consequences, and benefits of wildfire and helps prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events.
USGS science helps understand the causes, consequences, and benefits of wildfire and helps prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events.
Ecosystems Mission Area
The USGS Ecosystems Mission Area provides science to help America achieve sustainable management and conservation of biological resources in wild and urban spaces, and places in between.
News
Publications
A fundamental goal of population ecologists is to identify drivers responsible for temporal variation in abundance. Understanding whether variation is associated with environmental stochasticity or anthropogenic disturbances, which are more amenable to management action, is crucial yet difficult to achieve. Here, we present a hierarchical monitoring framework that models rates of change in abundan
Forecasting natural regeneration of sagebrush after wildfires using population models and spatial matching
ContextAddressing ecosystem degradation in the Anthropocene will require ecological restoration across large spatial extents. Identifying areas where natural regeneration will occur without direct resource investment will improve scalability of restoration actions.ObjectivesAn ecoregion in need of large scale restoration is the Great Basin of the Western US, where increasingly large and frequent w
Exploring effects of vessels on walrus behaviors using telemetry, automatic identification system data and matching
Arctic marine mammals have had little exposure to vessel traffic and potential associated disturbance, but sea ice loss has increased accessibility of Arctic waters to vessels. Vessel disturbance could influence marine mammal population dynamics by altering behavioral activity budgets that affect energy balance, which in turn can affect birth and death rates. As an initial step in studying these l
Science
Organic Contaminants in Reuse Waters and Transport Following Land Application
Potential reuse waters contained unique mixtures of organic contaminants with the greatest number detected in treated municipal wastewater treatment plant effluent, followed by urban stormwater, and agricultural runoff. This study provided information for decisions on reuse strategies to support freshwater supplies.
Avian Influenza Dynamics in the Chesapeake Bay Region
This project focuses on understanding the forces driving the risk of avian influenza transmission from wild waterfowl to domestic poultry within the Chesapeake Bay region.
Expanding Distribution of Chronic Wasting Disease
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) has been detected in 30 US states and four Canadian provinces in free-ranging cervids and/or commercial captive cervid facilities. CWD has been detected in free-ranging cervids in 29 states and three provinces and in captive cervid facilities in 18 states and three provinces.