Publications

Quantifying aeolian processes is important to decision-making in river management and for optimizing strategies for ecosystem conservation, natural resource management, and recreation. We applied the AeoLiS aeolian transport model, originally developed for coastal environments, to a dryland river corridor to evaluate its ability to simulate sediment dynamics in a fluvial-aeolian system...

While conducting avalanche mitigation or traveling through the backcountry, avalanche professionals sometimes experience a "whumpf": a collapse-mode crack accompanied by surface cracking that does not produce an avalanche. These whumpfs are a clear warning sign of instability in the surrounding terrain. But assessing the collapsed slope itself, if it is steep enough to avalanche, carries...

Mount Veniaminof is a frequently active, open-system arc volcano on the Alaska Peninsula, part of the Alaska-Aleutian arc. Mount Veniaminof's September–December 2018 eruption began with small lava flows and culminated in a larger explosive event in November that produced a 450 km long continuous ash plume—one of the volcano's most significant ash-producing events in recently observed...

Metal sulfide minerals are abundant phases in many environments on earth, including seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) deposits, which occur at hydrothermal vents throughout the global ocean. These deep-sea settings are currently undergoing exploration for potential future mining. Here, we describe rocks from Escanaba Trough on the southern Gorda Ridge that underwent spontaneous combustion...

The Sheep Creek area in southwest Montana contains a number of small, tabular, carbonatite-related deposits that are rich in Nb and REE minerals. Nb-rich minerals from Sheep Creek and nearby Woods Creek are herein described in detail. The carbonatite veins contain a mix of calcite and Fe-bearing dolomite, with locally abundant apatite, baryte, celsian, actinolite, phlogopite, monazite-...

1.Individual movement strategies govern access to important habitats but can expose certain animals to spatially and temporally variable threats, producing consistent, phenotype-specific differences in risk. For endangered Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus), migration timing shapes exposure risk to vessel strikes, dredging activity, and shifting estuarine conditions, yet management...

Wind protection is a central focus of western monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) overwintering habitat conservation. The Wind Disruption Hypothesis guiding management decisions predicts that winds at or above 2 m/s disrupt clusters and that cluster abundance decreases as wind speed increases. At two California groves during the 2023–2024 overwintering season, we paired time-lapse...

The Mississippi Alluvial Plain ecoregion in Mississippi was historically part of the largest continuous wetland in North America but was clearcut and converted to row crop agriculture beginning in the late 1800s. To reduce the effects of agriculture on surface waters in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, nutrient reduction best management practices have been implemented throughout the...

Energy resource development in southwestern Wyoming has been rapidly expanding since the early 2000s to include innovative technologies for extracting oil and gas and enhancing renewable energy. In response to concerns about the potential negative effects of energy development on natural resources, the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative was created to implement a long-term...

Barrier islands are at the forefront of climate-driven changes, with their resiliency threatened by rapid fluctuations in the physical drivers that shape them. Quantifying magnitudes and directions of storm-driven sediment fluxes and rates and modes of sediment recovery is essential for predicting barrier island trajectories. Yet scarce shoreface observations have limited such efforts...

To improve flood-frequency estimates for urban streams in Alabama and Mississippi, the U.S Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Alabama and Mississippi Departments of Transportation, estimated streamflows corresponding to selected annual exceedance probabilities (AEPs) for 64 streamgages on urban streams in the two States—48 in Alabama and 16 in Mississippi. Using estimates from 42...

A comprehensive understanding of life history is vital to successful species conservation and management. When different life history stages are accompanied by considerable morphological or cryptic variation, such as the egg and larval phases exhibited by most fishes, genomic tools are essential for identifying species so that early-life ecology questions can be studied. Genotyping-in...