Publications

Fish habitat can degrade in many lakes due to summer blue-green algal blooms. Predictive models are needed to better manage and mitigate loss of fish habitat due to these changes. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, developed predictive water-quality models for two agricultural land-use dominated lakes in Minnesota—Madison...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed that white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) recently spawned in the lower San Joaquin River, California. Decreases in the San Francisco Bay estuary white sturgeon population have led to an increased effort to understand their migration behavior and habitat preferences. The preferred spawning habitat of other white sturgeon (for example...

The increasing demands on groundwater for water supply in desert areas in California and the western United States have resulted in the need to better understand groundwater sources, availability, and sustainability. This is true for a 650-square-mile area that encompasses the Antelope Valley, El Mirage Valley, and Upper Mojave River Valley groundwater basins, about 50 miles northeast of...

Groundwater has been the primary source of domestic, agricultural, and municipal water supplies in the southwestern Mojave Desert, California, since the early 1900s. Increased demands on water supplies have caused groundwater-level declines of more than 100 feet (ft) in some areas of this desert between the 1950s and the 1990s (Stamos and others, 2001; Sneed and others, 2003). These...

Secure, reliable, and sustainable water resources are fundamental to the Nation’s food production, energy independence, and ecological and human health and well-being. Indications are that at any given time, water resources are under stress in selected parts of the country. The large-scale development of groundwater resources has caused declines in the amount of groundwater in storage...

Climate change, tectonics, and humans create long- and short-term temporal variations in the supply of suspended sediment to rivers. These signals, generated in upland erosional areas, are filtered by alluvial storage before reaching the basin outlet. We quantified this filter using a random walk model driven by sediment budget data, a power-law distributed probability density function...

The U.S. Geological Survey has developed a new global high-resolution hydrologic derivative database. Loosely modeled on the HYDRO1k database, this new database, entitled Hydrologic Derivatives for Modeling and Analysis, provides comprehensive and consistent global coverage of topographically derived raster layers (digital elevation model data, flow direction, flow accumulation, slope...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has investigated statistical methods for probabilistic flood hazard assessment to provide guidance on very low annual exceedance probability (AEP) estimation of peak-streamflow frequency and the quantification of corresponding uncertainties using streamgage-specific data. The term “very low AEP...

Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CyanoHAB) are thought to be increasing globally over the past few decades, but relatively little quantitative information is available about the spatial extent of blooms. Satellite remote sensing provides a potential technology for identifying cyanoHABs in multiple water bodies and across geo-political boundaries. An assessment method was developed...

This report establishes specific rules for writing computer source code for use with the National Land-Change Modeling Framework (NLCMF). These specific rules consist of conventions and principles for writing code primarily in the C and C++ programming languages. Collectively, these coding conventions and coding principles create an NLCMF programming style. In addition to detailed naming

The geomorphology and sediment regimes of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) are extremely diverse, owing in large part to the substantial spatiotemporal variability of the associated hydrological regimes. We describe the geomorphological character and sediment transport processes along IRES within the context of four geomorphological zones—upland, piedmont, lowland, and...

In intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (hereafter, IRES), hydrological connectivity mediated by either flowing or nonflowing water extends along three spatial dimensions—longitudinal, lateral, and vertical—and varies over time. Flow intermittence disrupts this connectivity, operating through complex hydrological transitions (e.g., between flowing and nonflowing phases). These...