Book Chapters

Sand Hollow Reservoir in southwestern Utah, USA, is operated for both surface-water storage and managed aquifer recharge via infiltration from surface basin spreading to the underlying Navajo Sandstone. The total volume of estimated recharge from 2002 through 2011 was 131 Mm3., resulting in groundwater levels rising as much as 40 m. Hydraulic and hydrochemical data from the reservoir and...

The US is in the midst of a continental scale, multiyear water resources experiment. What are we doing? We are expanding population at two to three times the national growth rate, particularly where water stress is already great. We are expanding irrigated agriculture from the west to the east, where increased competition for water has urban, agricultural, and environmental interests at...

Biological soil crusts, a community of cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, and fungi, are an essential part of dryland ecosystems. They are critical in the stabilization of soils, protecting them from wind and water erosion. Similarly, these soil surface communities also stabilized soils on early Earth, allowing vascular plants to establish. They contribute nitrogen and carbon to otherwise...

Tidal-marsh sediment is an archive of Holocene environmental changes, including movements of sea and land levels, and extreme events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Accurate and precise radiocarbon dating of environmental changes is necessary to estimate rates of change and the recurrence interval (frequency) of events. Plant macrofossils preserved in growth position (or...

No abstract available.

1. Introduction 1.1. FORMS, TOXICITY, AND HEALTH EFFECTS Mercury (Hg) has long been identified as an element that is injurious, even lethal, to living organisms. Exposure to its inorganic form, mainly from elemental Hg (Hg(0)) vapor (Fitzgerald & Lamborg, 2007) can cause damage to respiratory, neural, and renal systems (Hutton, 1987; USEPA, 2012; WHO, 2012). The organic form...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The Hawaiian archipelago, the most isolated cluster of islands on Earth, has been colonized successfully twice by bats. The putative “lava tube bat” of Hawaii is extinct, whereas the Hawaiian Hoary Bat, Lasiurus cinereus semotus, survives as an endangered species. We conducted a three-stage analysis to identify conditions under which hoary bats originally colonized Hawaii. We used FLIGHT...

This chapter identifies four key challenges and opportunities for long-term conservation of biodiversity in the Hawaii's Islands. Following are the challenges that need to be resolved for remaining species of native forest birds to survive into the next century: invasive species, landscape processes, social factors, and climate change. These challenges are also relevant to other...

In the late nineteenth century and twentieth century, there was considerable interest and activity to develop the United States for agricultural, mining, and many other purposes to improve the quality of human life standards and prosperity. Most of the work to support this development was focused along disciplinary lines with little attention focused on ecosystem service trade-offs or...

Natural Ecosystems analyzes the association of observed changes in climate with changes in the geographic distributions and phenology (the timing of blossoms or migrations of birds) for Southwestern ecosystems and their species, portraying ecosystem disturbances—such as wildfires and outbreaks of forest pathogens—and carbon storage and release, in relation to climate change.