Reports

The California Department of Transportation, commonly known as CalTrans, and other municipal separate storm sewer system permittees in California as well as other State departments of transportation nationwide need information about potential loads and yields (loads per unit area) of constituents of concern in stormwater runoff and discharges from stormwater best management practices...

A study was conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Navy (the Navy) to determine the status of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in groundwater at the former Naval Air Warfare Center (NAWC) in West Trenton, New Jersey. Wells contaminated with VOCs were sampled in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 as part of the Navy’s...

Integrating recent science into management decisions supports effective natural resource management and can lead to better resource outcomes. However, finding and accessing science information can be time consuming and costly. To assist in this process, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is creating a series of annotated bibliographies on topics of management concern for western lands...

Although some of California’s giant sequoia trees have stood for thousands of years and are adapted to withstand frequent low and mixed severity fires (Stephenson 1996), preliminary estimates suggest that the 2020 Castle Fire killed between 31% to 42% of large sequoias within the Castle Fire footprint, or 10% to 14% of all large sequoias across the tree’s natural range in the Sierra...

Geochemical data are presented for more than 1,500 archived stream-sediment samples and accompanying quality control samples. The archived sediments were reanalyzed to improve the stream geochemical dataset for Alaska and to support ongoing U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) studies. Sediment samples were primarily from the USGS Mineral Resources Program’s sample archive in Denver, Colorado...

A two-dimensional hydraulic model; water-surface profiles; and digital maps of water-surface elevation, velocities, and water depths were developed for a 6.7-mile reach of Joachim Creek within and near the city of De Soto, Missouri. Water-surface profiles were generated for the 10-, 4-, 2-, 1-, and 0.2-percent annual exceedance probability (10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year recurrence...

Increasing demand for the limited water resources of the United States continues to put pressure on resource management agencies to balance the competing needs of ecosystem health with municipal, agricultural, and other uses. To meet these needs, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a multiyear study to evaluate water resources in the upper Rio Grande Basin in the southwestern United...

Mount Rushmore National Memorial (hereafter referred to as “the memorial”), in western South Dakota, is maintained by the National Park Service (NPS) and includes 1,278 acres of land in the east-central part of the Black Hills. An ongoing challenge for NPS managers at the memorial is providing water from sustainable and reliable sources for operations, staff, and the increasing number of...

Executive Summary The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been using its Circular 891 for evaluating uncertainty in coal resource assessments for more than 35 years. Calculated cell tonnages are assigned to four qualitative reliability classes depending exclusively on distance to the nearest drill hole. The main appeal of this methodology, simplicity, is also its main drawback. Reliability...

The handbooks and synchronized MP4 recordings provide hands-on instruction for creating and analyzing vegetation live fractional cover (LFC) maps. The methods and protocols used in the instruction materials follow those developed and recorded in Rangoonwala and Ramsey (2019). The LFC mapping and geographic information system (GIS) analyses highlight the consortium of rangeland...

The Albuquerque Basin, located in central New Mexico, is about 100 miles long and 25–40 miles wide. The basin is hydrologically defined as the extent of consolidated and unconsolidated deposits of Tertiary and Quaternary age that encompasses the structural Rio Grande Rift between San Acacia to the south and Cochiti Lake to the north. A 20-percent population increase in the basin from...

The Proximity Visualization Tool is a simple lightweight tool that can be placed on web pages that allows users to identify non-native species near Department of Interior lands. The tool works by accessing the more than 400 million species occurrence records in the Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation (BISON) database using the BISON Application Programming Interface (API).