Publications

Dryland degradation from unsustainable land use and increasing aridity often manifests as bare, interconnected areas that facilitate the loss or redistribution of resources (soil, seeds, and nutrients) through wind and run-off. Physical structures like branches and stick bundles, which disrupt these pathways and retain resources, are crucial for rehabilitation and restoration...

Introduction Established in 1935, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program is a unique cooperative partnership among State fish and wildlife agencies, host universities, the Wildlife Management Institute, USGS, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Designed to meet the scientific needs of natural resource management agencies and to produce...

The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Civil Applications Center obtained remote sensing data and imagery collected from 1939 through 2023 to monitor changes at Fire Island National Seashore, New York. On October 29, 2012, an inlet was created during Hurricane Sandy on Fire Island that remained open for 10 years. This inlet, named the “Wilderness Breach,” formed at the same location where...

The U.S. Geological Survey is working with Federal land management agencies to develop a series of science syntheses to support National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses. This report synthesizes science information about the potential effects of nonmotorized recreation on ungulates in the western United States. We conducted a structured literature search to find published science...

The calcified structures of fishes provide insight into their periodic growth rates and can be combined with other biological variables to identify metrics such as size or age at maturity and mortality rates. Collecting this information on growth and life history can help evaluate the success of conservation efforts and inform future management decisions for a species in need. However...

Montane meadows provide vital habitat that supports ecosystems, regulate hydrological processes, and offer valuable recreational opportunities. Meadows account for 3 % of Yosemite National Park's area, including Yosemite Valley, and are particularly susceptible to human impacts such as formation of informal trails. We collected observational data on visitor activity and quantified social...

The U.S. Geological Survey recently (2025) completed a provisional assessment of the geothermal-electric resources associated with high-temperature, low-permeability rock formations of the Great Basin, Southwestern United States. If sufficient technological advances to commercialize enhanced geothermal systems occur, then a current best provisional estimate for electric-power generation...

Renibacterium salmoninarum, the cause of bacterial kidney disease (BKD), severely impacts salmonid populations. Much of our understanding of the BKD pathology in salmonids comes from evaluating fatal infections in wild populations or spawning Pacific Northwest salmonids. Our study investigated the histological progression and bacterial load dynamics of R. salmoninarum infection in...

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean conventional and continuous resources of 473 million barrels of oil and 27 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Mowry Composite Total Petroleum System in the Southwestern Wyoming Province, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.

Foragers on patchy landscapes must acquire sufficient resources despite uncertainty in the location and amount of the resources. Optimal Foraging Theory posits that foragers deal with this uncertainty by using strategies that optimize resource intake within foraging periods. For species such as wading birds, this optimization is closely linked to their survival and reproductive success

Animal space use, activity patterns, and habitat selection—and heterogeneity in these patterns—have important implications for where and when infectious diseases are transmitted. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are habitat generalists, with a high degree of heterogeneity in their movement ecology based on sex, age, season, and region. These heterogeneities have important...

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) of North America has high seismic hazard due to numerous earthquake sources under populated areas. It hosts several tectonic regimes and subregional seismic zones that are hypothesized to have different patterns of earthquake and aftershock occurrence. It is also predisposed to earthquake swarms, which can complicate the statistical modeling of these patterns...