Publications

This research investigates the impact of wildfires on watershed flow regimes, specifically focusing on evaluation of fire events within specified hydroclimatic regions in the western United States, and evaluating the impact of climate and geophysical variables on response. Eighty-two watersheds were identified with at least 10 years of continuous pre-fire daily streamflow records and 5...

The magnitude of annual exceedance probability floods is greatly affected by the coefficient of skewness (skew) of the annual peak flows at a streamgage. Standard flood frequency methods recommend weighting the station skew with a regional skew to better represent regional and stable conditions. This study presents an updated analysis of a regional skew for New England developed using a...

Estuaries worldwide are undergoing changes to patterns of aquatic productivity because of human activities that alter flow, impact sediment delivery and thus the light field, and contribute nutrients and contaminants like pesticides and metals. These changes can influence phytoplankton communities, which in turn can alter estuarine food webs. We used multiple approaches-including high...

High-frequency water-quality monitoring stations measure and transmit data, often in near real-time, from a wide range of aquatic environments to assess the quality of the Nation’s water resources. Common instrumentation for high-frequency water-quality data collection uses a multi-parameter sonde, which typically has sensors that measure and record water temperature, specific...

Nuclear research activities at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho National Laboratory (INL) produced liquid and solid chemical and radiochemical wastes that were disposed to the subsurface resulting in detectable concentrations of some waste constituents in the eastern Snake River Plain (ESRP) aquifer. These waste constituents may affect the water quality of the aquifer and may...

No abstract available.

Karst aquifers have hydrogeologic characteristics that render them uniquely vulnerable to contamination from emerging contaminants (ECs). ECs comprise numerous chemical groups, including pharmaceuticals, personal-care products, flame retardants, perfluorinated and polyfluorinated compounds, nanoparticles and microplastics. Many ECs have sources, transport pathways, and chemical...

The Paradox Valley in southwestern Colorado is a collapsed anticline formed by movement of the salt-rich Paradox Formation at the core of the anticline. The salinity of the Dolores River, a tributary of the Colorado River, increases substantially as it crosses the valley because of discharge of brine-rich groundwater derived from the underlying salts. Although the brine is naturally...

Streamwater quality can be affected by climate-related variability in hydrologic state, which controls flow paths and affects biogeochemical processes. Thirty-one years of input/output solute fluxes at Panola Mountain Research Watershed, a small, forested, seasonally water-limited watershed near Atlanta, Georgia, were used to quantify the effects of climatic-related variability in...

Arctic Indigenous communities have been classified as highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The remoteness of Arctic communities, their dependence upon local species and habitats, and the historical marginalization of Indigenous peoples, enhances this characterization of vulnerability. However, vulnerability is a result of diverse historical, social, economic, political, cultural

Understanding streamflow in montane watersheds on regional scales is often incomplete due to a lack of data for small-order streams that link precipitation and snowmelt processes to main stem discharge. This data deficiency is attributed to the prohibitive cost of conventional streamflow measurement methods and the remote location of many small streams. Expedient and low-cost streamflow

Neonicotinoid insecticides are highly water soluble with relatively long half-lives, which allows them to move into and persist in aquatic ecosystems. However, little is known of the impacts of neonicotinoids on non-target vertebrates, especially at sublethal concentrations. We evaluated the effects of the neonicotinoid clothianidin on the behavior of southern leopard frog tadpoles (Rana