Reports

To improve understanding of how recent changes in lower trophic levels in Lake Michigan could be affecting prey-fish biomass and production, the Lake Michigan Committee (LMC) convened a Lower Trophic Level Task Group and provided several charges that are responded to in this report. First, we compiled a comprehensive summary of lower trophiclevel data in Lake Michigan, separating out...

Signatures developed from metal concentrations in water and fish bony structures can be used to demonstrate migration of individual fish between connected water bodies. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the National Park Service and the Missouri Department of Conservation, compared two protocols for collecting and analyzing water samples for concentrations of several...

A critical component of the Lake Michigan Diversion Accounting program, which oversees the diversion of Great Lakes water by the State of Illinois, is the U.S. Geological Survey streamgage on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Lemont, Illinois. The long-term application of an up-looking acoustic Doppler current profiler at this streamgage allows the flows at this study site to be...

Climate change is expected to alter the composition, structure, and function of forested ecosystems in the United States (Vose et al. 2012). Increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide [CO2]) and temperature, as well as altered precipitation and disturbance regimes (e.g., fire, insects, pathogens, and windstorms), are expected to have profound...

There are two components to this document. The first component is the scope of described environmental change and its impacts in Port Heiden Alaska. The second component is a list of priorities to be addressed that will help Port Heiden achieve its vision for the future. Each priority area incorporates local knowledge with available climate science and takes the expected future changes...

Wildlife reservoirs of infectious disease are a major source of human-wildlife conflict because of the risk of potential spillover associated with commingling of wildlife and livestock. In Montana, the presence of brucellosis (Brucella abortus) in free-ranging elk (Cervus canadensis) populations is of significant management concern because of the risk of disease transmission from elk to...

Stream entry of many fishes is influenced by environmental factors including water temperature, stream discharge, and photoperiod (Leggett 1977; Jonsson 1991). Environmental factors influence stream entry differently depending on the species and life stage of fish, likely because of varying physiologies and life histories (Lucas and Baras 2008). Many spring-run migratory fishes occupy...

Recent field surveillances indicated that outmigrating steelhead smolts in several south Puget Sound watersheds are infected with the digenean trematode Nanophyetus salmonicola at high prevalence and intensity (Chen et al Accepted). The apparent severity of these infections, especially in the Nisqually and Green / Duwamish Rivers, lead to the hypothesis that Nanophyetus may play a role...

1. The assessment of terrestrial wetland carbon stocks has improved greatly since the First State of the Carbon Cycle Report (CCSP 2007) because of recent national inventories and the development of a U.S. soils database. Terrestrial wetlands in North America encompass an estimated 2.2 million km2, which constitutes about 37% of the global wetland area, with a soil and vegetation carbon...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed the South Carolina StreamStats application in cooperation with the South Carolina Department of Transportation. StreamStats (https://water.usgs.gov/osw/streamstats/) is a map-based web application that provides analytical tools useful for water-resources planning and management and many engineering purposes. The web application delineates...

Alviso Slough area, South San Francisco Bay, California, is the site of an ongoing effort to restore former salt production ponds to intertidal habitat. As restoration proceeds and the levees surrounding the former salt production ponds are breached, the increase in tidal prism and associated sediment scour in the sloughs will remobilize legacy mercury deposits. A numerical model that is...

In 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, initiated a study to assess the regional groundwater resources in the Bunker Hill Subbasin of the Upper Santa Ana Valley Groundwater Basin in San Bernardino County, California. The study area expanded east into the Yucaipa Subbasin in 1996. This report compiles the geologic...