Publications

Tropical regions are experiencing high rates of forest cover loss coupled with changes in the volume and timing of rainfall. These shifts can compromise streamflow and water provision, highlighting the need to identify how forest cover influences streamflow generation under variable rainfall conditions. Although rainfall is the key driver of streamflow regimes, the role of forests is...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Kansas Water Science Center Organic Geochemistry Research Laboratory (OGRL) was established in 1987. The OGRL is a multidisciplinary program that contributes knowledge about the distribution, fate, transport, and effects of new and understudied organic compounds that may affect human health and (or) ecosystems. The OGRL consists of two units: Algal and...

This systematic assessment of occurrence for 85 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in raw (untreated) groundwater used for public supply across the United States (U.S.), which includes 43 compounds not previously monitored by national studies, relates VOC occurrence to explanatory factors and assesses VOC detections in a human-health context. Samples were collected in 2013 through 2019...

Accurately determining sediment loads is necessary for managing river environments but is difficult because multiple processes can lead to large discharge-independent changes in sediment transport. Thus, estimations of sediment load using discharge–sediment rating curves fit to sparse or historical sediment-transport measurements can be inaccurate, necessitating alternative approaches to...

The U.S. Geological Survey worked in cooperation with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to assess the potential sources of fecal contamination entering Port Jefferson Harbor, Setauket Harbor, and Conscience Bay, an embayment complex on the northern shore of Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. Water samples are routinely collected by the New York State...

The Rice Creek Watershed District (RCWD) cooperated with the U.S. Geological Survey to establish a 10-year suspended sediment and bedload monitoring and streamflow modeling study to evaluate the effects of two restored meander sections on middle Rice Creek in Arden Hills, Minnesota. The RCWD goals of this stream restoration were to reduce water quality impairments, improve aquatic...

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is widely used in engineered particles including engineered nanomaterial (ENM) and pigments, yet its occurrence, concentrations, temporal variability, and fate in natural environmental systems are poorly understood. For three years, we monitored TiO2 concentrations in a rural river basin (Edisto River, 1% urban land cover) in South Carolina, United States. The...

The local climatic impacts of historical expansion of irrigation are substantial, but the distant impacts are poorly understood, and their governing mechanisms generally have not been rigorously analyzed. Our experiments with an earth-system model suggest that irrigation in the Middle East and South Asia may enhance rainfall in a large portion of the Sahel-Sudan Savanna (SSS) to an...

Wildfires in forested watersheds dramatically alter stored and labile soil organic matter (SOM) pools and the export of dissolved organic matter (DOM). Ecosystem recovery after wildfires depends on soil microbial communities and revegetation and therefore is limited by the availability of nutrients, such as nitrogen-containing and labile, water-soluble compounds. However, SOM byproducts...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) created a virtual training series for the Afghanistan Ministry of Energy and Water (MEW), now known as the National Water Affairs Regulation Authority (NWARA), to provide critical hydrological training as an alternative to an in-person training. The USGS was scheduled to provide in-person surface-water training for NWARA during 2020; however, travel was...

Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest...

Annual bank erosion was measured at multiple cross sections along the free-flowing meandering Powder River in the western United States from 1979 through 2019. Bank erosion was separated into two components—above water and underwater erosion. Above water erosion was measured as the annual bank retreat rate (0–15.4 m y−1). Underwater erosion rate (0–47 m3 m−1 y−1) was calculated as the...