Publications

Understanding the local to regional history of extreme events such as debris flows and floods provides context to plan for and mitigate these hazards to life, property, and infrastructure. The Klamath Mountains of northwestern California have experienced both debris flows and devastating wildfires. Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (WHIS) is at the heart of this range and has a wealth...

History matching of large hydrologic models is challenging due to data sparsity and non-unique process combinations (and associated parameters) that can produce similar model predictions. We develop an ensemble-based history matching (and uncertainty quantification) approach using an iterative ensemble smoother (iES) method for three cutouts of the National Hydrologic Model (NHM) and...

Understanding how environmental changes affect the health of organisms and ecosystems is complex, but recent interdisciplinary advances and the recognition of immune function as a dynamic mediator offer exciting progress. Environmental immunotoxicology in teleost fishes is evolving beyond cataloguing stressors towards a mechanistic, integrative framework that leverages omics, in vivo...

Urban forests and other green infrastructures have been viewed as part of the “Nature-based Solutions” (NbS) to mitigate emerging urban environmental change. This study focuses on the role of evapotranspiration (ET) in regulating water balances of small watersheds in the eastern United States. We compared streamflow and ET patterns at daily, monthly and annual scales and linked these...

Although a few studies have focused on avian gut virome variation in response to environmental stressors, none have assessed virome in relation to the production of chemically intensive crop-based agriculture that alters food resources and detrimentally affects various aspects of avian health and fitness. In this study, we used shotgun metatranscriptomics to assess whether exposure to...

In April 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center introduced a Level 2 provisional Aquatic Reflectance (AR) product for the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), marking the initial phase in developing a standardized global product for Landsat-derived surface water measurements. The goal of USGS EROS aquatic product research and...

Assimilation efficiency is a critical assumption of stable isotope mixing models and bioenergetics models, yet few studies examine how assimilation efficiency influences modeling inferences. We conducted laboratory experiments to determine rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) assimilation efficiencies. Assimilation efficiency averaged 55.8% (SE ± 0.90) and 64.5% (SE ± 1.98) at the 10% and...

Although migration is widespread among ungulates, the fitness benefits associated with different migratory tactics have rarely been documented. Here, we evaluated a 9-year dataset on a migratory population of mule deer to test the hypothesis that long-distance migration provides access to seasonal forage which translates into demographic benefits. Mule deer that migrated long (>130 km)...

Climate change, expanding human ignitions, and increased fuels from fire exclusion are driving increases in area burned and fire severity in dry conifer forests of the western United States. Increasing area burned is occurring against the backdrop of a large fire deficit caused by over a century of fire exclusion. A key land management question is whether historically frequent fire...

Building on a previously developed bedrock dataset, this study extends the Azores Plateau ground motion simulations to include soil-amplified records and introduces a comprehensive validation framework. Soil amplification is modeled using one-dimensional soil profiles. A stochastic source-based approach is employed to generate the dataset, incorporating randomization of input-model...

Fossilized soils, or paleosols, contain soil-formed phyllosilicates whose stable isotopic compositions may be used to calculate paleotemperature and thus reconstruct ancient terrestrial environments. Though paleosols are common in the geologic record, the use of phyllosilicates as paleotemperature proxies is limited in the literature owing to difficulties with selecting optimal paleosols

Wildlife and their habitats face profound challenges from climate and landscape-scale changes that extend beyond the influence and time horizon of most biologists and land managers. In this changing environment, long-term datasets can enhance assessments of how demographic trends respond to interactions among local (e.g., habitat restoration decisions) and broad extent drivers, including...