All Publications

Rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus 2 (RHDV2; Caliciviridae, Lagovirus europaeus), the cause of a highly transmissible and fatal lagomorph disease, has spread rapidly through the western United States and Mexico, resulting in substantial mortality in domestic and wild rabbits. The disease was first detected in California in May 2020, prompting an interagency/zoo/academia/nonprofit team to...

Objective In a changing climate, the effects of air temperature, precipitation, and groundwater on water temperature and thermal habitat suitability for Gulf Sturgeon Acipenser desotoi, listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, are not well understood. Hence, we incorporated these factors into thermal habitat models to forecast how Gulf Sturgeon may be affected by wide...

There is a rapid, global push for wind energy installation. However, large numbers of bats are killed by turbines each year, raising concerns about the impacts of wind energy expansion on bat populations. Preventing turbine blades from spinning at low wind speeds, referred to as curtailment, is a method to reduce bat fatalities, but drawing consistent inference across studies has been...

Although coastal islands are home to many endemic species, they are also at risk of inundation from storm surge and sea level rise. Three subspecies of mole skink (Plestiodon egregius egregius, P. e. insularis, and the Egmont Key Mole Skink known from a single occurrence) occur on a small number of islands off the Gulf Coast of Florida, USA. We used the most recent sea level rise...

Residents of Carson Valley, Douglas County, Nevada, rely on the basin-fill alluvial aquifer underlying the valley for drinking water. Since the 1980s, groundwater levels and water-quality data have been collected to monitor the status of the aquifer system and to assist in planning efforts to address current (2024) and future demand. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with...

The U.S. Geological Survey Community for Data Integration annually funds small projects focusing on data integration for interdisciplinary research, innovative data management, and demonstration of new technologies. This report provides a summary of the 12 projects funded in fiscal year 2020, outlining their goals, activities, and accomplishments.

Objective Flathead Catfish Pylodictis olivaris are a widespread aquatic invasive species within the United States and a recent invader in the Susquehanna River basin, Pennsylvania. Flathead Catfish are piscivores known to consume native and recreationally important fish species. In the mid-Atlantic United States, it is unknown how this invader is impacting food webs and which species may...

Background Wildfires are increasing in size and severity due to climate change combined with overstocked forests. Fire increases the likelihood of debris flows, posing significant threats to life, property, and water supplies. Aims We conducted a debris-flow hazard assessment of the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed (SFMW) to answer two questions: (1) where are debris flows most likely to...

Hydrological drought is a pervasive and reoccurring challenge in managing water resources. Reservoirs are critical for lessening the impacts of drought on water available for many uses. We use a novel and generalized approach to identify periods of unusually low reservoir storage—via comparisons to operational rule curves and historical patterns—to investigate how droughts affect storage...

The U.S. Geological Survey-managed ShakeAlert® earthquake early warning system is the first public alerting system in the United States to provide rapid mass notification when an earthquake is detected. Although public alert delivery via mobile phones began in California in 2019 followed by Oregon and Washington in 2021, little is known about what might drive widespread implementation in...

The cisco Coregonus artedi is a coldwater fish that is distributed throughout much of Canada and the northern United States, including the Laurentian Great Lakes. Cisco historically supported large commercial fisheries in the Great Lakes during the late 1800s and early 1900s, but many populations declined and never recovered. Restoration efforts focusing on re-establishing cisco in the...

The Aurora software package robustly estimates single station and remote reference electromagnetic transfer functions (TFs) from magnetotelluric (MT) time series. Aurora is part of an open-source processing workflow that leverages the self-describing data container MTH5, which in turn leverages the general mt-metadata framework to manage metadata. These pre-existing packages simplify the