Conference Papers

Prioritisation of mine pollution sources for remediation is a key challenge facing environmental managers. This paper presents a numerical modelling methodology to evaluate potential improvements in stream water quality from remediation of important mine pollution sources. High spatial resolution synoptic sampling data from a Welsh watershed were used to calibrate the OTIS solute...

USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper, the second of two parts, addresses processing the collected...

USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper discusses the measurement of the intrinsic erosion and...

Urban development and associated land cover transitions alter the thermal and physical properties of the land surface, resulting the temperature in urban area higher than in rural area or urban heat island (UHI). Remote sensing and land cover data is usually used to assess UHI intensity and temporal change trends. In this study, we implemented a prototype approach to characterize the UHI...

The rapid technological development of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) has led to an increase in capabilities of aerial image collection and analysis for monitoring a variety of wildlife species including waterfowl. Biologists mainly rely on conducting ocular surveys from fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters to estimate waterfowl abundance. sUAS provide an alternative that is safer...

Developing fast and accurate surrogates for physics-based coastal and ocean mod- els is an urgent need due to the coastal flood risk under accelerating sea level rise, and the computational expense of deterministic numerical models. For this purpose, we develop the first digital twin of Earth coastlines with new physics-informed machine learning techniques extending the state-of-art...

This paper proposes a new physics-guided machine learning approach that incorporates the scientific knowledge in physics-based models into machine learning models. Physics-based models are widely used to study dynamical systems in a variety of scientific and engineering problems. Although they are built based on general physical laws that govern the relations from input to output...

Mississippi Valley-type (MVT) and clastic-dominated (CD) deposits are important sources for Zn, Pb, Ag, and Cd as well as the critical elements Ga, Ge, In, and Sb. However, mapping the drivers, sources, pathways, and traps of MVT and CD deposits within the much larger and mostly unmineralized sedimentary basins remain some of the least understood aspects of these mineral systems. Herein...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assesses potential for undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources in priority geologic provinces and quantifies resource volume estimates within subdivisions called assessment units (AUs). AU boundaries are defined by USGS geologists using quantitative and qualitative geologic information. Variables contained in IHS Markit’s well and...

This paper studies the impacts of sea-level rise on liquefaction triggering and severity around the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for the M 7.0 “HayWired” earthquake scenario along the Hayward fault. This work emerged from stakeholder engagement for the US Geological Survey releases of the HayWired earthquake scenario and the Coastal Storm Modeling System projects, in which local...

Correspondence analysis is a multivariate method that can be applied to mineral abundance data. Ore mineral assemblages from broadly underutilized prospect and occurrence data can be treated as geochemical anomalies, projected to low-dimensional space, and returned into map view. This approach could have applications for mineral prospectivity mapping and delineation of permissive areas...

The advent of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) has improved the feasibility of wireless sensor networks for environmental sensing across wide areas. We have built EnviSense, an ultra-low power environmental sensing system, and deployed over a dozen of them across two locations in Northern California for hydrological monitoring applications with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This...