Publications

Examining urban thermal environments has become a critical area of research spanning epidemiology, urban planning, and ecology. While traditional metrics like air temperature (Tair) and satellite-derived surface temperature dominate urban heat studies, these measures often fail to reflect how people actually experience thermal exposure intensity. More human-oriented metrics, such as mean...

Groundwater depletion for agricultural irrigation poses significant environmental and economic challenges. This study introduces a proof-of-concept that combines hydro-economic modeling, scenario-based modeling, and multi-objective optimization to manage pumping curtailment in an over-allocated basin in the western United States. Three optimization scenarios were evaluated, each offering...

Resolving thermal histories in sedimentary basins is crucial for interpreting orogenic growth, basin burial, and tectonic processes during Cordilleran orogenesis. In the Magallanes–Austral Basin, Patagonian Andes, we integrate new (U-Th)/He thermochronology, vitrinite reflectance (%Ro), calcite-cement clumped isotope data and thermal history modelling to resolve the origin of the...

Postfire debris flows pose a hazard to human life, property, and infrastructure when they travel from steep source areas to urbanized alluvial fans or other developed areas. Existing methods for rapid (

Wildfires alter surface soil moisture by consuming vegetation and exposing the soil to increased solar radiation, increased precipitation throughfall, and reduced infiltration from soil hydrophobicity. This can affect the water balance within the watershed and, in turn, influence post-fire nutrient cycling and ecosystem succession. Modeling surface soil moisture over large areas using...

The distribution and abundance of Phragmites in the Great Lakes coastal zone has expanded in part due to its unique ventilation physiology and its ability to take advantage of changes in lake levels over the past several decades. During an extended period of low lake levels in the early 2000s, Phragmites expanded into vast shallow water areas as lake bottoms were exposed. Many of those...

The Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer provides irrigation, public, and domestic water supplies across the south-central United States. Declining groundwater levels require improved characterization of changing conditions. Traditional potentiometric-surface mapping does not use all available water-level data or quantify uncertainty. To address these limitations, we developed a...

Existing reservoir management frameworks traditionally consider historical (predam) flow conditions to deliver environmental flows. Such frameworks may not be feasible because current demand and/or climate could be different from predam conditions. Hence, we developed a multireservoir framework that explicitly considers both human water demands and environmental flow requirements to...

Patterns of resource selection are driven by the decision-making processes of animals occurring at multiple scales from where to establish a home range (i.e., second order selection) to which resource patches to use within the home range (i.e., third order selection). Elk (Cervus canadensis) were reintroduced to southwestern Virginia, USA, from 2012 to 2014 following successful...

The giant gartersnake (Thamnophis gigas) is a semi aquatic snake endemic to the Central Valley of California. After losing 95 percent of its historic wetland habitat (Frayer and others, 1989), giant gartersnakes became state and federally listed as a threatened species (California Fish and Game Commission, 1971; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 1993, 1999). Continued monitoring of current

No abstract available.

Using solar wind and ground magnetometer data for solar cycles 23–25, extreme-value power-law models are developed that quantify relationships between near-Earth solar wind speed and Sun-to-Earth transit times of interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). The models of near-Earth solar wind speed, conditional on ICME transit time, are (a) approximately stable for transit times as...