Publications

Data were collected at two monitoring sites along the Little Arkansas River in south-central Kansas that bracket most of the easternmost part of the Equus Beds aquifer. The data were used as part of the city of Wichita’s aquifer storage and recovery project to evaluate source water quality. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the City of Wichita, has continued to monitor the...

Lake Powell is the second largest constructed water reservoir by storage capacity in the United States and represents a critical component in management of water resources in the Colorado River Basin. The reservoir provides hydroelectric power generation at Glen Canyon Dam, banks water storage for the Upper Colorado River Basin, stabilizes water commitments downstream, and buffers the...

Bennett et al. (2021, Science 373, 1528–1531) reported that ancient human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park, New Mexico date to between ∼23,000 and 21,000 years ago. Haynes (2022, PaleoAmerica, this issue) proposes two alternate hypotheses to explain the antiquity of the footprints. One is that they were made by humans crossing over older sediments sometime during the...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board, collected streamflow and water-quality data at USGS monitoring stations in the lower Trinity River Basin from January 2016 to December 2019 to characterize streamflow, nutrients, and suspended sediment entering Galveston Bay from the Trinity River. Results from previous studies indicate that water...

Habitat loss is the most prevalent threat to biodiversity in North America. One of the most threatened landscapes in the United States is the sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystem, much of which has been fragmented or converted to non-native grasslands via the cheatgrass-fire cycle. Like many sagebrush obligates, greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) depend upon sagebrush for...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of synthetic chemicals detected throughout the environment. To better understand the distribution of PFAS in an aquatic system (the Laurentian Great Lakes), stable isotope enrichment (δ13C and δ15N), fatty acid (FA) profiles, and PFAS were measured in various species from the Lake Ontario (LO) aquatic food web. Sampled organisms...

Coregonine fishes are important to Laurentian Great Lakes food webs and fisheries and are central to basin-wide conservation initiatives. In Lake Ontario, binational management objectives include conserving and restoring spawning stocks of cisco (Coregonus artedi) and lake whitefish (C. clupeaformis), but the spatial extent of contemporary coregonine spawning habitat and the...

Attempts to mitigate shoreline microbial contamination require a thorough understanding of pollutant sources, which often requires multiple years of data collection (e.g., point/nonpoint) and the interacting factors that influence water quality. Because restoration efforts can alter shoreline or beach morphology, revisiting source inputs is often necessary. Microbial source tracking (MST...

Understanding dreissenid mussel population dynamics and their impacts on lake ecosystems requires quantifying individual growth across a range of habitats. Most dreissenid mussel growth rates have been estimated in nutrient rich or nearshore environments, but mussels have continued to expand into deep, cold, low-nutrient habitats of the Great Lakes. We measured annual quagga mussel...

Wild reproduction by stocked lake trout Salvelinus namaycush in Lake Ontario has yet to produce a self-sustaining population, requiring a reliance on stocking. Once released, age-1 juvenile lake trout are not typically surveyed until age-2, creating a gap in knowledge of fine-scale post-release behaviors. A method to track fine-scale movements and estimate mortality of juvenile lake...

Saginaw Bay is a shallow, nutrient-rich embayment in Lake Huron that historically had a complex network of natural rocky reefs. These reef habitats were used as spawning and nursery areas for a variety of fish species, but decades of land-use related sedimentation caused many of these reefs to be degraded. Our study objectives were to analyze abiotic and biotic conditions on degraded and...

Inland lakes face unprecedented pressures from climatic and anthropogenic stresses, causing their recession and desiccation globally. Climate change is increasingly blamed for such environmental degradation, but in many regions, direct anthropogenic pressures compound, and sometimes supersede, climatic factors. This study examined a human-environmental system – the terminal Hamun Lakes...