Publications

Effective conservation of Cutthroat Trout Oncorhynchus clarkii lineages native to the Rocky Mountains will require estimating effects of multiple stressors and directing management toward the most important ones. Recent analyses have focused on the direct and indirect effects of a changing climate on contemporary ranges, which are much reduced from historic ranges owing to past habitat...

Significant efforts are underway to translate improved understanding of how climate change is altering ecosystems into practical actions for sustaining ecosystem functions and benefits. We explore this transition in California, where adaptation and mitigation are advancing relatively rapidly, through four case studies that span large spatial domains and encompass diverse ecological...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources, established a Long-Term Trend Monitoring (LTTM) program in 1996. The LTTM program is a comprehensive, long-term, water-quantity and water-quality monitoring program designed to document and analyze the hydrologic and water-quality conditions of selected watersheds in Gwinnett County...

Wastewaters from oil and gas development pose largely unknown risks to environmental resources. In January 2015, 11.4 M L (million liters) of wastewater (300 g/L TDS) from oil production in the Williston Basin was reported to have leaked from a pipeline, spilling into Blacktail Creek, North Dakota. Geochemical and biological samples were collected in February and June 2015 to identify...

In order to provide long-term storage of diverted surface water from the Rio Grande as part of the Aamodt water rights settlement, managed aquifer recharge by surface infiltration in Pojoaque River Basin arroyos was proposed as an option. The initial hydrogeologic and geochemical characterization of two arroyos located within the Pojoaque River Basin was performed in 2014 and 2015 in...

The San Francisco estuary is commonly defined to include San Francisco Bay (bay) and the adjacent Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta (delta). The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has operated a high-frequency (15-minute sampling interval) water-quality monitoring network in San Francisco Bay since the late 1980s (Buchanan and others, 2014). This network includes 19 stations at which...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board and the Galveston Bay Estuary Program, collected streamflow and water-quality data at USGS streamflow-gaging stations in the lower Trinity River watershed from May 2014 to December 2015 to characterize and improve the current understanding of the quantity and quality of freshwater inflow entering...

Trends in long-term water-quality and streamflow data from six water-quality-monitoring stations within three major river basins in Massachusetts and Rhode Island that flow into Narragansett Bay and Little Narragansett Bay were evaluated for water years 1979–2015. In this study, conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental...

Phytoplankton are critical component of the food web in most large rivers and estuaries, and thus identifying dominant controls on phytoplankton abundance and species composition is important to scientists, managers, and policymakers. Recent studies from a variety of systems indicate that ammonium ( NH+4) in treated wastewater effluent decreases primary production and alters...

Introduction The Floridan aquifer system (FAS) consists of the Upper Floridan aquifer (UFA), an intervening confining unit of highly variable properties, and the Lower Floridan aquifer (LFA). The UFA and LFA are primarily composed of Paleocene- to Oligocene-age carbonate rocks that include, locally, Upper Cretaceous rocks. The FAS extends from coastal areas in southeastern South Carolina...

Introduction In 2016, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the San Antonio Water System, began a study to refine previously derived estimates of groundwater outflows from Medina and Diversion Lakes in south-central Texas near San Antonio. When full, Medina and Diversion Lakes (hereinafter referred to as the Medina/Diversion Lake system) (fig. 1) impound approximately...

Lithologic differences give rise to the differential weatherability of the Earth’s surface and globally variable silicate weathering fluxes, which provide an important negative feedback on climate over geologic timescales. To isolate the influence of lithology on weathering rates and mechanisms, we compare two nearby catchments in the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory in Puerto Rico...