Reports

The Drinking Water Protection Section of the Minnesota Department of Health conducted reconnaissance monitoring of selected public water systems in Minnesota. Funding was obtained primarily from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund. Sampling was conducted in 2019 and 2021. Laboratory analysis of samples was conducted for a variety of different contaminants of emerging concern...

Condit Dam was removed from river kilometer (rkm) 5.3 of the White Salmon River, Washington, in 2011 and 2012 after blocking upstream passage of anadromous fish for nearly 100 years. The dam removal opened habitat upstream and improved habitat downstream with addition of cobble and gravel to a reach depauperate of spawning and rearing habitat. We assessed juvenile anadromous salmonid...

An illustrated diagram of the water cycle. This is a modern, updated version of the widely used diagram featured on the USGS Water Science School. Notably, this new water cycle diagram depicts humans and major categories of human water use as key components of the water cycle, in addition to the key pools and fluxes of the hydrologic cycle. This product targets an 8th grade audience and...

Terrestrial sediment discharging from watersheds off West Maui, Hawaiʻi, has been documented as a primary stressor to local coral reefs, causing coral reef health to decline. The U.S. Geological Survey acquired and analyzed physical oceanographic and sedimentologic field data off the coast of West Maui to calibrate and validate physics-based, numerical hydrodynamic and sediment transport...

“The Bay Connects us, the Bay reflects us” writes Tom Horton in the book “Turning the Tide—Saving the Chesapeake Bay”. The Chesapeake Bay watershed contains the largest estuary in the United States. The watershed stretches north to Cooperstown, New York, south to Lynchburg and Virginia Beach, Virginia, west to Pendleton County, West Virginia, and east to Seaford, Delaware, and Scranton

In coordination with the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and in response to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced a documented unplugged orphaned oil and gas well dataset (called the DOW dataset hereafter) that contains the location and status of these wells nationwide as of 2022. The DOW dataset includes 117,672 wells across 27 states...

Censored and uncensored generalized additive models (GAMs) were developed using streamflow data from 941 U.S. Geological Survey streamflow-gaging stations (streamgages) to predict decadal statistics of daily streamflow for streams draining to the Gulf of Mexico. The modeled decadal statistics comprise no-flow fractions and L-moments of logarithms of nonzero streamflow for six decades...

Loss and degradation of sagebrush rangelands due to an accelerated invasive annual grass-wildfire cycle and other stressors are significant management, conservation, and economic issues in the western United States. These sagebrush rangelands comprise a unique biome spanning 11 states, support over 350 wildlife species, and provide important ecosystem services that include stabilizing...

Loss and degradation of sagebrush rangelands due to an accelerated invasive annual grass-wildfire cycle and other stressors are significant management, conservation, and economic issues in the western United States. These sagebrush rangelands comprise a unique biome spanning 11 states, support over 350 wildlife species, and provide important ecosystem services that include stabilizing...

Loss and degradation of sagebrush rangelands due to an accelerated invasive annual grass-wildfire cycle and other stressors are substantial management, conservation, and economic issues in the western United States. These sagebrush rangelands comprise a unique biome spanning 11 states, support over 350 wildlife species, and provide important ecosystem services that include stabilizing...