Articles

Assessing riparian ecosystem water use, particularly transpiration from vegetation and evaporation from soils (‘plant water use’, hereafter), is key to developing sound water management approaches. In western North America, a multidecadal drought is reducing water availability and increasing the use of detailed water budgets. Questions related to both removal of vegetation for water...

Invasive species within North America, particularly wild pigs (Sus scrofa), pose a serious threat to native ecosystems through both direct and indirect impacts. Wild pigs are a large-bodied omnivorous species native to Eurasia and introduced to North America. Using DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples, we investigated the diet of wild pigs at a bottomland hardwood forest ecosystem within...

The Outer California Borderland (OCB) is an active transform plate boundary offshore Southern California, where the relationship between faulting and submarine mass transport deposits (MTDs) remains poorly understood. Onshore paleoseismic data provide high-resolution earthquake records, whereas marine geophysical data capture longer-term histories. Offshore fault systems pose hazards to

Chinook salmon population declines span their geographic range with climate hypothesized as a major driver. Concerns of warming freshwater temperatures in their northern range gained urgency during 2019 when a heatwave coincided with premature mortality. This study examined heat stress during the 2019 heatwave compared to subsequent years and described water temperatures in western...

Understanding the local to regional history of extreme events such as debris flows and floods provides context to plan for and mitigate these hazards to life, property, and infrastructure. The Klamath Mountains of northwestern California have experienced both debris flows and devastating wildfires. Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (WHIS) is at the heart of this range and has a wealth...

History matching of large hydrologic models is challenging due to data sparsity and non-unique process combinations (and associated parameters) that can produce similar model predictions. We develop an ensemble-based history matching (and uncertainty quantification) approach using an iterative ensemble smoother (iES) method for three cutouts of the National Hydrologic Model (NHM) and...

Understanding how environmental changes affect the health of organisms and ecosystems is complex, but recent interdisciplinary advances and the recognition of immune function as a dynamic mediator offer exciting progress. Environmental immunotoxicology in teleost fishes is evolving beyond cataloguing stressors towards a mechanistic, integrative framework that leverages omics, in vivo...

Urban forests and other green infrastructures have been viewed as part of the “Nature-based Solutions” (NbS) to mitigate emerging urban environmental change. This study focuses on the role of evapotranspiration (ET) in regulating water balances of small watersheds in the eastern United States. We compared streamflow and ET patterns at daily, monthly and annual scales and linked these...

Although a few studies have focused on avian gut virome variation in response to environmental stressors, none have assessed virome in relation to the production of chemically intensive crop-based agriculture that alters food resources and detrimentally affects various aspects of avian health and fitness. In this study, we used shotgun metatranscriptomics to assess whether exposure to...

The Fairbanks region of central Alaska is part of a broad zone of intraplate crustal deformation, situated north of the Denali fault and north of the ongoing collision and flat‐slab subduction of the Yakutat oceanic plateau. Seismicity in the Fairbanks region occurs both in diffuse areas as well as in well‐defined lineaments, such as the left‐lateral Salcha fault, which hosted the 1937...

In April 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center introduced a Level 2 provisional Aquatic Reflectance (AR) product for the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), marking the initial phase in developing a standardized global product for Landsat-derived surface water measurements. The goal of USGS EROS aquatic product research and...

Assimilation efficiency is a critical assumption of stable isotope mixing models and bioenergetics models, yet few studies examine how assimilation efficiency influences modeling inferences. We conducted laboratory experiments to determine rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) assimilation efficiencies. Assimilation efficiency averaged 55.8% (SE ± 0.90) and 64.5% (SE ± 1.98) at the 10% and...