Articles

The stress field controls patterns of crustal deformation, including which faults are likeliest to cause earthquakes or transmit fluids. Since the 1950s, maps of maximum horizontal stress (SHmax) orientations have advanced dramatically, and the style of faulting (relative principal stress magnitudes) has recently been mapped in some regions as well. This perspectives paper summarizes...

Globally, coastal communities experience flood hazards that are projected to worsen from climate change and sea level rise. The 100-year floodplain or record flood are commonly used to identify risk areas for planning purposes. Remote communities often lack measured flood elevations and require innovative approaches to estimate flood elevations. This study employs observation-based...

The Paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) has been extirpated from portions of its native range due to anthropogenic habitat degradation and fragmentation, most notably the impoundment of rivers. To mitigate some of these losses in Oklahoma, Paddlefish have been stocked into reservoirs throughout the state, with variable success in establishing self-sustaining populations. Two factors thought...

Science is fundamental to sound policies, particularly when it comes to implementing an Ecosystem Approach. Science can and should inform nearly all facets of an Ecosystem Approach, yet challenges remain to realizing this goal. To help identify and better understand these challenges we used a qualitative comparative case study approach to identify and characterize the challenges and...

Maintaining the integrity and health of aquatic ecosystems is critical to sustaining the many valued services that they provide society. Unfortunately, achieving this goal has proven challenging in most of the world's large ecosystems owing to rampant environmental change caused by human-driven stress, including accelerating climate change, pollution of waterways, habitat modification...

Anthropogenically driven flow intermittency is increasing in freshwater streams, with important implications for the management and conservation of aquatic ecosystems. Because most freshwater fishes are mobile, they are expected to emigrate from intermittent reaches, but this may not be true in streams transitioning from perennial to intermittent. Here, we attempt to determine if...

Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, USA, occupy the southern periphery of the species' range and are vulnerable to climate change. In the eastern UP, hares are isolated by the Great Lakes, potentially exacerbating exposure to climate-change-induced habitat alterations. Climate change is also measurably affecting distribution and prevalence of vector...

Non-contact, remote sensing approaches to measuring flow velocities in river channels are widely used, but typical workflows involve acquiring images in the field and then processing data later in the office. To reduce latency between acquisition and output, with the ultimate goal of enabling real-time image velocimetry, we developed a Robot Operating System (ROS) package for Particle...

Many populations migrate between two different habitats (e.g. wintering/foraging to breeding area, mainstem–tributary, river–lake, river–ocean, river–side channel) as part of their life history. Detection technologies, such as passive integrated transponder (PIT) antennas or sonic receivers, can be placed at boundaries between habitats (e.g. near the confluence of rivers) to detect...

Exotic annual grass invasion is a widespread threat to the integrity of sagebrush ecosystems in Western North America. Although many predictors of annual grass prevalence and native perennial vegetation have been identified, there remains substantial uncertainty about how regional-scale and local-scale predictors interact to determine vegetation heterogeneity, and how associations...

This paper describes development of a nitrate decision support tool for groundwater wells (GW-NDST) that combines nitrate leaching and groundwater lag-times to compute well concentrations. The GW-NDST uses output from support models that simulate leached nitrate, groundwater age distributions, and nitrate reduction rates. The support models are linked through convolution to simulate...

Predicting the potential distribution of a non-native species can assist management efforts to mitigate impacts on recipient ecosystems. However, such predictions are lacking for marine species, such as the non-native regal demoiselle, Neopomacentrus cyanomos, that is currently expanding its distribution in the western Atlantic. We used correlative species distribution models with three...