Water, Coasts and Ice

This project was designed to use the combined strengths of the cooperators to address their concerns stemming from the degradation of arid environments in the Great Basin. The project aimed to identify the regional ecological and social costs and benefits of both immediate hydrologic modifications (low-profile constructed dams) and longer-term restoration of beavers (Castor canadensis)...

Migratory birds may be hit especially hard by climate change – particularly waterbirds that depend on wetlands as resting and feeding sites during their journey between breeding and non-breeding grounds. California’s Central Valley and the interior basins of southeastern Oregon and northeastern California provide some of the most critical wetlands resources to migratory waterbirds in the...

Resource managers must balance the impacts of competing management decisions on multiple, interacting natural systems. Hydrologic and ecological processes, such as groundwater fluctuations and riparian evapotranspiration, can be tightly coupled. Ideally, managers would have tools and models that include all processes to better understand how each management action would propagate through...

The Rio Grande-Rio Bravo River is the second longest river in the US and is a critical drinking water source for more than 13 million people. It flows south from the snow-capped mountains of Colorado through the New Mexico desert, forms the border between Texas and Mexico, and empties into the Gulf of America at Brownsville, Texas. The multi-national, multi-state, ecologically diverse...

The Rio Grande-Rio Bravo River is the second longest river in the US and is a critical drinking water source for more than 13 million people. It flows south from the snow-capped mountains of Colorado through the New Mexico desert, forms the border between Texas and Mexico, and empties into the Gulf of America at Brownsville, Texas. The multi-national, multi-state, ecologically diverse...

This project was designed to use climate models to produce projections of changes in sea temperatures and ocean chemistry for coastal marine areas in Micronesia as well as reports that describe the outlook of culturally important marine sites in Guam and CNMI. The projections and maps were expected show what the current state of climate science suggests the future holds for marine areas...

As the impacts of climate change amplify, understanding the consequences for wetlands will be critical for their sustainable management and conservation, particularly in arid regions such as the Columbia Plateau. The depressional wetlands in this region (wetlands located in topographic depressions where water can accumulate) are an important source of surface water during the summer...

Climate change poses a variety of threats to biodiversity. Most efforts to assess the likely impacts of climate change on biodiversity try to rank species based on their vulnerability under changed environmental conditions. These efforts have generally not considered the ability of organisms to adjust their phenotype to the changing environment. Organisms can do this by one of two ways...

National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) along the East Coast of the United States protect habitat for a host of wildlife species, while also offering storm surge protection, improving water quality, supporting nurseries for commercially important fish and shellfish, and providing recreation opportunities for coastal communities. Yet in the last century, coastal ecosystems in the eastern U.S...

Climate and land use change will strongly affect tropical island ecosystems and trust species (like migratory birds and threatened and endangered species). The risks of significant negative impacts are likely to be higher in these island systems than in many temperate regions of the world because of the limited size of their land masses, high numbers of species that only exist in...

Clouds often come in contact with vegetation (often named fogs) within a certain elevation range on Hawaiʻi’s mountains. Propelled by strong winds, cloud droplets are driven onto the stems and leaves of plants where they are deposited. Some of the water that accumulates on the plants in this way drips to the ground, adding additional water over and above the water supplied by rainfall...

On Hawai‘i’s mountains, cloud droplets, propelled by strong winds, are deposited on plants, where they accumulate and drip to the ground, adding water over and above that supplied by rainfall. Prior studies show that the amount of intercepted cloud water is substantial, and variable from place to place. Estimates of the spatial patterns of cloud water interception (CWI), the fog-related...