Publications

Benthic invertebrates play vital roles in estuarine ecosystems, but like other taxa they have been excluded from former marshlands by diking and land use conversion. Dike removal is one way of restoring marsh, but the response of benthic invertebrates has been little studied. Also understudied is variation in benthic invertebrate communities across entire deltas, particularly in the...

The extent and nature of the Wyoming Province, an Archean craton in southwestern Laurentia, are poorly understood due to limited exposure between spatially isolated basement-cored uplifts. This lack of exposure has led to debate about whether the northeastern Wyoming Province is underlain by contiguous Archean crust or Proterozoic rocks and suture zone associated with the Trans-Hudson...

Groundwater-influenced ecosystems (GIEs) are increasingly vulnerable due to groundwater extraction, land-use practices, and climate change. These ecosystems receive groundwater inflow as a portion of their baseflow or water budget, which can maintain water levels, water temperature, and chemistry necessary to sustain the biodiversity that they support. In some systems (e.g., springs...

Supraglacial lakes have been observed to drain within hours of each other, leading to the hypothesis that stress transmission following one drainage may be sufficient to induce hydro-fracture-driven drainages of other nearby lakes. However, available observations characterizing drainage-induced stress perturbations have been insufficient to evaluate this hypothesis. Here, we use ice...

During the 2018 Kīīlauea lower East Rift Zone eruption, lava from 24 fissures inundated more than 8000 acres of land, destroying more than 700 structures over three months. Eruptive activity eventually focused at a single vent characterized by a continuously fed lava pond that was drained by a narrow spillway into a much wider, slower channelized flow. The spillway exhibited intervals of...

Many management and conservation contexts can benefit from understanding relationships between species abundances, which can be used to improve predictions of species occurrence and abundance.We present conditional prediction as a tool to capture information about species abundances via residual covariance between species. From a fitted joint species distribution model, this framework...

Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), one of the most frequently detected per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) occurring in soil, surface water, and groundwater near sites contaminated with aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), has proven to be recalcitrant to many destructive remedies, including chemical oxidation. We investigated the potential to utilize microbially mediated reduction

The 30 November 2018, magnitude (Mw) 7.1 earthquake in Southcentral Alaska triggered substantial landslides, liquefaction, and ground cracking throughout the region, resulting in widespread geotechnical damage to buildings and infrastructure. Despite a challenging reconnaissance and remote-sensing environment, we constructed a detailed digital inventory of ground failure associated with...

Rapid changes in sea ice extent and changes in freshwater inputs from land are rapidly changing the nature of Arctic estuarine ecosystems. In the Beaufort Sea, these nearshore habitats are known for their high productivity and mix of marine resident and diadromous fishes that have great subsistence value for Indigenous communities. There is, however, a lack of information on the spatial...

Much of what is known about the effects of the 1886 Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake throughout the epicentral region can be attributed to meticulous field investigations by an individual with training in geology and engineering, Earle Sloan (Clendenin, 1926). In a recent study, Bilham and Hough (2024) undertook a detailed analysis of the effects of the earthquake on railroads in...

Soil seed banks help maintain species diversity through temporal storage effects and function as germination pools that can optimize fitness across varying environmental conditions. These characteristics promote the persistence of native plant communities, yet disturbances such as fire and associated invasions by non-native species can disrupt these reserves, fundamentally altering...

Oblique-slip along transform fault boundaries is often partitioned between a strike-slip system and thrust faults that accommodate contraction. However, topography along the Yakutat-North American transform (Fairweather fault), is asymmetric with low-terrain above active thrusts on the western, Yakutat side of the transform and high topography on the continental side with peaks >4500 m...