Articles

Estuarine environments are critical to fish species and serve as nurseries for developing embryos and larvae. They also undergo daily fluctuations in salinity and act as filters for pollutants. Additionally, global climate change (GCC) is altering salinity regimes within estuarine systems through changes in precipitation and sea level rise. GCC is also likely to lead to an increased use...

Multistressor studies were performed in five regions of the United States to assess the role of pesticides as stressors affecting invertebrate communities in wadable streams. Pesticides and other chemical and physical stressors were measured in 75 to 99 streams per region for 4 weeks, after which invertebrate communities were surveyed (435 total sites). Pesticides were sampled weekly in...

Water is essential for life. The particles and dissolved chemicals found in rivers, lakes, and oceans are constantly changing with weather, seasons, and human activities. The substances found in water can be helpful or harmful to humans and other organisms. New technologies allow scientists to use waterproof computers (called sensors) to record the quality of water as it changes...

Desert spring systems of the American southwest hold high local fish endemism and are ranked among the most threatened ecosystems in the world. The prioritization of conservation resources to protect species living within these arid landscapes requires knowledge of species abundance and distribution. The plight of Conchos pupfish (Cyprinodon eximius) is representative of freshwater...

Background

Sicklefin (Macrhybopsis meeki) and sturgeon chub (M. gelida) historically occurred throughout the Missouri River (MR), in some tributaries, and Mississippi River downstream of the MR. They have been species of U.S. state-level conservation concern and U.S. Endangered Species Act listing candidates since the 1990s. We applied analytical approaches from occupancy modeling to correlation to

The southern fringing reef along Ofu, American Samoa, has been a focus of coral research owing to the presence of super-heated pools on the reef flat, where corals thrive in elevated sea temperatures. Here, we present the first documentation of exceptionally large low-frequency (periods > 100 s) waves over this reef flat. During a large, southerly swell event, low-frequency waves on the...

Widely separated basalt lava-flow outcrops in north-central Oregon, USA, expose products of a single eruptive episode. A Pliocene lava flow, here informally termed the Tetherow basalt, issued from vents near Redmond, in the Deschutes basin of Oregon, as a plains-forming basalt now exposed in continuous outcrops northward for 60 km. A similar basalt crops out 47 km farther north, near...

Biodiversity is threatened due to land-use change, overexploitation, pollution, and anthropogenic climate change, altering ecosystem functioning around the globe. Protecting areas rich in biodiversity is often difficult without fully understanding and mapping species’ ecological niche requirements. As a result, the umbrella species concept is often applied, whereby conservation of a...

In 2018, Costa Rica demonstrated its commitment to the Paris Agreement and published its Decarbonization Plan for achieving zero net emissions by the year 2050. We evaluate the impacts of the country's strategy for decarbonizing its Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses (AFOLU) sectors by coupling the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling framework with high-resolution spatial...

Marsh environments, characterized by their flora and fauna, change laterally in response to shoreline erosion, water levels and inundation, and anthropogenic activities. The Grand Bay coastal system (USA) has undergone multiple large-scale geomorphic and hydrologic changes resulting in altered sediment supply, depositional patterns, and degraded barrier islands, leaving wetland salt...

Climate warming is expected to increase global methane (CH4) emissions from wetland ecosystems. Although in situ eddy covariance (EC) measurements at ecosystem scales can potentially detect CH4 flux changes, most EC systems have only a few years of data collected, so temporal trends in CH4 remain uncertain. Here, we use established drivers to hindcast changes in CH4 fluxes (FCH4) since...