Publications

Macrophage aggregate (MA) abundance in fish is a useful general biomarker of contaminant exposures and environmental stress. Hepatic and splenic MAs were evaluated in semi-anadromous white perch Morone americana (Gmelin, 1789) from the urbanized Severn River (S) and the more rural Choptank River (C), Chesapeake Bay. Fish were collected from different sites in the annual migratory circuit...

Tidal freshwater forested wetlands (TFFWs) are in an active phase of transition to tidal marsh with sea level rise and salinity incursion along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States (U.S.). A prominent feature of TFFWs is hummock/hollow microtopography where hollows represent the flat, base-elevation of the floodplain where inundation occurs relatively frequently, while...

Records of relative sea-level rise for the last deglaciation are mostly limited to coral reef records and geophysical model estimates, but observational data from regions with temperate climates is sparse. We present a new relative climatic and regional sea-level rise record for glacial Termination 1 (Marine Isotope Stages [MIS] 2–1) based on ostracode paleoecology from the upper 8 m of...

Background Mobile radio tracking is an important tool in fisheries research and management. Yet, the accuracy of location estimates can be highly variable across studies and within a given dataset. While some methods are available to deal with error, they generally assume a static value for error across all detections. We provide a novel method for making detection-specific error...

Living shorelines gain increasing attention because they stabilize shorelines and reduce erosion. This study leverages physics-based models and bagged regression tree (BRT) machine learning algorithm to simulate wave dynamics at a living shoreline composed of constructed oyster reefs (CORs) in upper Delaware Bay. The physics-based models consist of coupled Delft3D-FLOW and SWAN in four...

Infragravity waves are key components of the hydro-sedimentary processes in coastal areas, especially during extreme storms. Accurate modeling of coastal erosion and breaching requires consideration of the effects of infragravity waves. Here, we present InWave, a new infragravity wave driver of the Coupled Ocean-Atmopshere-Waves-Sediment Transport (COAWST) modeling system. InWave...

Drinking-water quality is a rising concern in the United States (US), emphasizing the need to broadly assess exposures and potential health effects at the point-of-use. Drinking-water exposures to per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a national concern, however, there is limited information on PFAS in residential tapwater at the point-of-use, especially from private-wells. We...

Worldview-3 (WV3) 16-band multispectral data were used to map exposed bedrock and mine waste piles associated with legacy open-pit mining of sandstone-hosted roll-front uranium deposits along the South Texas Coastal Plain. We used the “spectral hourglass” approach to extract spectral endmembers representative of these features from the image. This approach first requires calibrating the...

From 2000 through 2020, demand for cobalt to manufacture batteries grew 26-fold. Eighty-two percent of this growth occurred in China and China’s cobalt refinery production increased 78-fold. Diminished industrial cobalt mine production in the early-to-mid 2000s led many Chinese companies to purchase ores from artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), many of...

In urbanized areas, the “freshwater salinization syndrome” (FSS), which pertains to long-term increases in concentrations of major ions and metals in fresh surface waters, has been attributed to road salt application. In addition to FSS, the water composition changes as an influx of sodium (Na+) in recharge may displace calcium (Ca2+), magnesium (Mg2+), potassium (K+), and trace metals...

Considerable effort has been made to link submarine slope failures to changes in local and global-scale environmental conditions, in order to assess landslide hazard probability. Here we provide the first radiocarbon dates of hemipelagic sediment overlying mass transport deposits and inferred failure surfaces of the Currituck Slide Complex (CSC), a prominent landslide scar on the U.S...

Freshwater is a vital natural resource. New York is a water-rich State; however, even here, the economical use of water resources is needed to ensure there is enough water of adequate quality for human and ecological needs—now and into the future. Nowhere in New York is this more evident than on Long Island where public-water supply is obtained from the sole-source aquifers directly...