Publications

The southern Piedmont in the U.S. was an important farming region during the 19th century, but by the end of the 20th century, agricultural land use had decreased substantially with forest becoming the majority land cover by the 1970s. Geographical literature has documented this change but has not concentrated on the region’s contemporary land uses. The Piedmont currently has three main...

Rapid urbanization has resulted in a series of sequential effects on a desert stream in the American Southwest. Lower Las Vegas Wash was a dry wash characterized by infrequent flood deposition when Las Vegas, Nevada was established in 1905. Wastewater effluent was discharged into the wash in low volumes for over 3 decades. Wastewater volumes increased commensurably with accelerated...

Human impacts on the environment are multifaceted and can occur across distinct spatiotemporal scales. Ecological responses to environmental change are therefore difficult to predict, and entail large degrees of uncertainty. Such uncertainty requires robust tools for management to sustain ecosystem goods and services and maintain resilient ecosystems.We propose an approach based on...

In North America, terrestrial records of biodiversity and climate change that span the Last Interglacial Period [or Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 5] are rare. In 2010-11, construction at Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado revealed a lacustrine/wetland sedimentary sequence that preserved evidence of past plant communities between ~140 and 55 ka, including all of MIS 5...

We are entering the third era of National Park Service (NPS) natural resources management— an era defined by rapid and unprecedented global changes. This third era promises to overturn not only some of our most fundamental assumptions about parks and protected areas, but also many of the ideals we currently hold dear. A common initial reaction to the diverse challenges of this transition...

Background

Context

No abstract available.

An outcrop-based lake-level curve, constrained by ~ 70 calibrated 14C ages on Anodonta shells, indicates at least 8 highstands between 45 and 25 cal ka BP within 10 m of the 543-m upper threshold of Lake Manix in the Mojave Desert of southern California. Correlations of Manix highstands with ice, marine, and speleothem records suggest that at least the youngest three highstands coincide...

This report provides data collected by the climate monitoring array of the U.S. Department of the Interior on Federal lands in Arctic Alaska over the period August 1998 to July 2013; this array is part of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, (DOI/GTN-P). In addition to presenting data, this report also describes monitoring, data collection, and quality-control methods. This...

Small terrestrial gastropod shells (mainly Succineidae) have been used successfully to date late Quaternary loess deposits in Alaska and the Great Plains. However, Succineidae shells are less common in loess deposits in the Mississippi Valley compared to those of the Polygyridae, Helicinidae, and Discidae families. In this study, we conducted several tests to determine whether shells of...

Analysis of a sediment core from Lago Puerto Arturo, a closed basin lake in northern Peten, Guatemala, has provided an ∼8700 cal year record of climate change and human activity in the southern Maya lowlands. Stable isotope, magnetic susceptibility, and pollen analyses were used to reconstruct environmental change in the region. Results indicate a relatively wet early to middle Holocene...