Publications

It is feasible to use acoustic Doppler velocity meters (ADVM's) installed at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) streamflow-gaging stations to compute records of river discharge. ADVM's are small acoustic current meters that use the Doppler principle to measure water velocities in a two-dimensional plane. Records of river discharge can be computed from stage and ADVM velocity data using the...

A method has been developed for estimating shoreline position from airborne scanning laser data. This technique allows rapid estimation of objective, GPS-based shoreline positions over hundreds of kilometers of coast, essential for the assessment of large-scale coastal behavior. Shoreline position, defined as the cross-shore position of a vertical shoreline datum, is found by fitting a...

Seawater and natural brines accounted for about 60% of US magnesium compounds production in 2001. Dead-burned and caustic-calcined magnesias were recovered from seawater in Florida by Premier Chemicals. They were also recovered from Michigan well brines by Dow Chemical, Martin Marietta Magnesia Specialties and Rohm & Haas. And Premier Chemicals recovered dead-burned and caustic-calcined...

In 1970, the Chester County Water Resources Authority (Pennsylvania) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) established a long-term water-quality network with the goal of assessing the quality of streams in the county and understanding stream changes in response to urbanization using benthic-macroinvertebrate data. This database represents one of the longest continuous water-quality data...

In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, and the National Park Service, conducted a study to assess the quantity of water in the bedrock units underlying Mt. Desert Island, and to estimate water use, recharge, and dilution of nutrients from domestic septic systems overlying the bedrock units in several watersheds in rural Bar Harbor. Water...

Conventionally managed orchards receive extensive applications of anticholinesterase (anti-ChE) insecticides throughout the growing season. Because many avian species make use of these environments for nesting and foraging, they may receive substantial exposure to anti-ChEs. The model used to assess avian risk in these environments is highly simplified, and indicator species used in risk...

Biological, chemical, and physical data were collected from a network of 43 sites in Chester County, Pa., from 1981 to 1997. The goal of the network is to assess stream conditions and determine trends in benthic-macroinvertebrate and water-chemistry data. Most sites in the network were assessed as nonimpacted or slightly impacted on the basis of biological metric analysis of benthic

We investigated the influence of age on survival and breeding rates in a long-lived species Rissa tridactyla using models with individual random effects permitting variation and covariation in fitness components among individuals. Differences in survival or breeding probabilities among individuals are substantial, and there was positive covariation between survival and breeding...

1. Demographic data from both breeding and non-breeding periods are needed to manage populations of migratory birds, many of which are declining in abundance and are of conservation concern. Although habitat associations, and to a lesser extent, reproductive biology, are known for many migratory species, few studies have measured survival rates of these birds at different parts of their...

Excess selenium (Se) in the aquatic food chain is embryotoxic and teratogenic to avocets, stilts, and other waterbirds. American avocet (Recurvirostra americana) and black-necked stilt (Himantopus mexicanus) eggs were collected from three sites in the Tulare Lake Basin of California, USA, and hatched in the laboratory. These sites included the Tulare Lake Drainage District-north (TLDD-N...

We used a probabilistic approach to address the influence of sampling artifacts on the form of species-area relationships (SARs). We developed a model in which the increase in observed species richness is a function of sampling effort exclusively. We assumed that effort depends on area sampled, and we generated species-area curves under that model. These curves can be realistic looking...

In 1995, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service adopted a protocol for the adaptive management of waterfowl hunting regulations (AHM) to help reduce uncertainty about the magnitude of sustainable harvests. To date, the AHM process has focused principally on the midcontinent population of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), whose dynamics are described by 4 alternative models...