Publications

Fine-grained sediment in stormwater acts as a vector for persistent organic pollutants, like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), through mobilization from sources within drainage areas of impacted urban watersheds. This study implemented a novel approach to identify the relative contributions of various landscape and stream sources of sediment from the Back River watershed in eastern...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)—in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for the Naval Reactors Laboratory Field Office that supports operations for the Naval Reactors Facility (NRF) located at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL)—drilled and constructed well NRF-17 (formerly borehole USGS 151) and well NRF-18 (formerly borehole USGS 152) for stratigraphic framework...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operated 12,165 continuous surface-water monitoring locations (streamgages) across the United States in 2024. The streamgages provide information on river height and streamflow, typically at 15-minute intervals. This information is then made available to everyone, most of it delivered nearly in realtime on the USGS National Water Dashboard.

The U.S. Geologic Survey National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) monitors global seismicity, producing a catalog of earthquake source parameters in near-real-time to provide information that can help mitigate the societal impact of earthquakes. The NEIC commonly relies on teleseismic observations to constrain earthquake source parameters (e.g., location, depth, magnitude, and...

Cottontails (Sylvilagus spp.) and jackrabbits (Lepus spp.) within the Leporidae family are native to North America and are found in a wide range of habitats, including deserts, forests, and grasslands. Although there is a growing body of research describing the arrival of the highly virulent rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus 2 (RHDV2, GI.2) on this continent, and its impact on native...

Alaska's coastal communities face growing landslide hazards owing to glacier retreat and extreme weather intensified by the warming climate, yet hazard monitoring remains challenging. As part of ongoing experimental monitoring in Prince William Sound, we detected three large landslides (0.5–2.3 M m3) at Surprise Inlet on 20 September 2024, within the span of an hour. These events were...

The Concord fault constitutes a major branch of the Pacific–North America transform plate boundary in Northern California, bridging the strike‐slip Bartlett Springs ‐ Green Valley Fault system to the north with the Greenville and Calaveras Faults to the south. Like many faults in the San Francisco Bay Area its long‐term slip is partially accommodated by aseismic slip (creep). Although...

Objective The Lake Winnebago system in Wisconsin supports a popular winter spear fishery for Lake Sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens. Setting harvest caps for this fishery relies on estimating instantaneous natural mortality rate (M), which can be done using age-based approaches or capture–recapture models that incorporate recoveries of fish with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags or...

We examined 30-year trends in the abundance and distribution of aquatic and floodplain vegetation, as well as human land uses in five study reaches of the Upper Mississippi River and one reach of the Illinois River using aerial photography collected in years 1989, 2000, 2010, and 2020. Permanently inundated area increased in all study reaches over the 30-year period. Increases ranged...

During the spring and summer of 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted single-well slug tests on selected observation wells within the Mississippi Alluvial Plain in Arkansas and Mississippi to estimate hydraulic conductivity and transmissivity values for the Mississippi River Valley alluvial and middle Claiborne aquifers. Well and aquifer data were collected from field measurements...

Executive Summary The U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Calibration and Validation (Cal/Val) Center of Excellence focuses on improving the accuracy, precision, calibration, and product quality of remote-sensing data, leveraging years of multiscale optical system geometric and radiometric calibration and characterization experience. The Earth Resources...

Executive Summary This report summarizes results from boat-based, high-resolution water-quality mapping surveys completed before, during, and after upgrades to the EchoWater Resource Recovery Facility (EchoWater Facility), the regional wastewater facility for the City of Sacramento and surrounding areas, near Elk Grove, California. Surveys were completed in the tidal aquatic environments...