Publications

The National Field Manual for the Collection of Water-Quality Data (National Field Manual) describes protocols and provides guidelines for U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) personnel who collect data used to assess the quality of the Nation's surface-water and ground-water resources. This chapter of the manual addresses the selection of equipment commonly used by USGS personnel to collect...

Arsenic is one of the most prevalent toxic elements in the environment. The toxicity, mobility, and fate of arsenic in the environment are determined by a complex series of controls dependent on mineralogy, chemical speciation, and biological processes. The element was first described by Theophrastus in 300 B.C. and named arsenikon (also arrhenicon; Caley and Richards 1956) referring to...

To quantify chemical weathering and biological uptake, mass-balance calculations were performed on two small forested watersheds located in the Blue Ridge Physiographic Province in north-central Maryland, USA. Both watersheds, Bear Branch (BB) and Fishing Creek Tributary (FCT), are underlain by relatively unreactive quartzite bedrock. Such unreactive bedrock and associated low chemical...

Overabundance of nutrients is considered one of the top challenges to most populated coastal water bodies, including Chesapeake Bay (Executive Order 13508). As scientists, one of our responsibilities is to contribute to the discussion and evaluation of management actions that have the potential to decrease pollution with concomitant improvement of water quality. Results of our science...

The western United States has been experiencing severe drought since 2013. The solid earth response to the accompanying loss of surface and near-surface water mass should be a broad region of uplift. We use seasonally adjusted time series from continuously operating global positioning system stations to measure this uplift, which we invert to estimate mass loss. The median uplift is 5...

We investigated occurrence, transport pathways, and effects of polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants and other endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in aquatic media and the foodweb in the lower Columbia River. In 2009 and 2010, foodweb sampling at three sites along a gradient of contaminant exposure near Skamania (Washington), Columbia City (Oregon) and Longview...

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are strongly linked to extreme winter precipitation events in the Western U.S., accounting for 80 percent of extreme floods in the Sierra Nevada and surrounding lowlands. In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey developed the ARkStorm extreme storm scenario for California to quantify risks from extreme winter storms and to allow stakeholders to better explore and...

Stream ecosystems are particularly sensitive to urbanization, and tolerance of water-quality parameters is likely important to population persistence of stream salamanders. Forecasted climate and landscape changes may lead to significant changes in stream flow, chemical composition, and temperatures in coming decades. Protected areas where landscape alterations are minimized will...

The Empire Mine, together with other mines in the Grass Valley mining district, produced at least 21.3 million troy ounces (663 tonnes) of gold (Au) during the 1850s through the 1950s, making it the most productive hardrock Au mining district in California history (Clark 1970). The Empire Mine State Historic Park (Empire Mine SHP or EMSHP), established in 1975, provides the public with...

Identifying hydraulically active fractures in low permeability, crystalline-bedrock aquifers requires a variety of geophysical and hydrogeophysical borehole tools and approaches. One such approach is Single Borehole Dilution Tests (SBDT), which in some low flow cases have been shown to provide greater resolution of borehole flow than other logging procedures, such as vertical...

As Shaw [2014] notes, U.S. research on shale as a repository host was halted before expending anything close to the effort devoted to studying crystalline rock, salt, and - most notably - tuff at Yucca Mountain. The new political reality regarding Yucca Mountain may allow reconsideration of the decision to abandon research on shale as a repository host.

Natural streamflows play a critical role in stream ecosystems, yet quantitative relations between streamflow alteration and stream health have been elusive. One reason for this difficulty is that neither streamflow alteration nor ecological responses are measured relative to their natural expectations. We assessed macroinvertebrate community condition in 25 mountain streams representing...