Articles

Background Amplified wildfire activity in forests of the western United States threatens biodiversity. Fuel treatments can reduce fire severity, modify fire behavior, and restore forest structure and composition, yet impacts of some treatments, including slash piling and burning, on wildlife have received little attention. Piling of residual woody material may create habitable...

Greenland White-fronted Geese Anser albifrons flavirostris exhibit prolonged parent–offspring and sibling–sibling associations, suggesting fitness advantages to such behaviour, so we used reduced representation genome sequence data to determine the degree to which marked flock members observed associating in apparent parent–offspring and sibling–sibling relationships in the field were...

Invasion of non-native riparian vegetation along southwestern USA rivers is associated with channel narrowing and simplification, prompting numerous and varied removal efforts. Channel width and migration rate often, but not always, increase following treatment. The cause of this variability and the duration of response is poorly understood. Using flow records and aerial imagery we...

This document examines the Chesapeake Bay watershed response to nutrient and sediment reduction efforts under the Clean Water Act's total maximum daily load (TMDL) regulation. As the 2025 Chesapeake Bay TMDL deadline approaches, water quality goals remain unmet, primarily because of nonpoint source pollution, the largest remaining source of nutrients and sediment, and the primary...

Large surface-rupturing intraplate earthquakes in stable continental regions (SCRs) are uncommon globally and have recurrence intervals of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years based on the paleoseismic and geomorphic record, challenging accurate active fault identification in these regions. To constrain the timescales of preservation for scarps created by surface ruptures from dip...

No abstract available.

Expansion of floating photovoltaic (FPV) solar systems provides a low-conflict renewable energy option to help mitigate climate change while sparing land, but potential sustainability trade-offs remain unquantified. We compare the technical potential of maximum FPV deployment to address the climate crisis with FPV-buildout scenarios that prioritize biodiversity and social values across...

Uranium (U) in rocks and soils of arid and semi-arid environments can be mobilized by irrigation and fertilization, posing environmental and health risks. Elevated U, along with selenium (Se) and nitrate (NO3) co-constituents, necessitates careful monitoring and management. We developed a distributed-parameter numerical model to assess U pollution in an irrigated stream-aquifer system...

We present geochemical data from gas samples from ∼1200 km of arc in the Central Volcanic Zone of the Andes (CVZA), the volcanic arc with the thickest (∼70 km) continental crust globally. The primary goals of this study are to characterize and understand how magmatic gases interact with hydrothermal systems, assess the origins of the major gas species, and constrain gas emission rates...

Background Fuel monitoring data are essential to evaluate wildfire risk, plan management activities and evaluate fuel treatment effects. Terrestrial light detection and ranging (lidar) is a field-based 3D scanning technology with great potential to reduce labor-intensive field measurements and provide new depths of vegetation structure data. Aims To facilitate the integration of...

Diamondback terrapins, hereafter referred to as terrapins, are the only estuarine turtle species native to North America. However, terrapins are also occasionally found in marine habitats, such as seagrass beds, and yet little is known about how they use those marine habitats. We sampled epidermis from terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin macrospilota) inhabiting a seagrass-dominated coastal...

Understanding salt marsh resilience under increasing sea levels can inform for management decisions. We compared temporal projections from various wetland process-based models and a geospatially derived metric (i.e., marsh lifespan) to understand key considerations and uncertainties about salt marsh resilience when using these products for decision-making. The influences of lidar...