Publications

Staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, is a threatened species and the primary focus of western Atlantic reef restoration efforts to date. We compared linear extension, calcification rate, and skeletal density of nursery-raised A. cervicornis branches reared for 6 months either on blocks attached to substratum or hanging from PVC trees in the water column. We demonstrate that branches...

Potential contamination bias was estimated for 8 nutrient analytes and 40 pesticides in stream water collected by the U.S. Geological Survey at 147 stream sites from across the United States, and representing a variety of hydrologic conditions and site types, for water years 2002–12. This study updates previous U.S. Geological Survey evaluations of potential contamination bias for...

Description Land development and alterations of the ecosystem in south Florida over the past 100 years have decreased freshwater and increased nutrient flows into many of Florida's estuaries, bays, and coastal regions. As a result, there has been a decrease in the water quality in many of these critical habitats, often prompting seagrass die-offs and reduced fish and aquatic life...

Corals do not typically thrive in mangrove environments. However, corals are growing on and near the prop roots of red mangrove trees in Hurricane Hole, an area within the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument under the protection of the US National Park Service in St. John, US Virgin Islands. This review summarizes current knowledge of the remarkable biodiversity of this area...

The stochastic empirical loading and dilution model (SELDM) was used to demonstrate methods for estimating risks for water-quality exceedances of event-mean concentrations (EMCs) of total-copper. Monte Carlo methods were used to simulate stormflow, total-hardness, suspended-sediment, and total-copper EMCs as stochastic variables. These simulations were done for the Charles River Basin...

Barrier islands are dynamic environments due to their position at the land-sea interface. Storms, waves, tides, currents, and relative sea-level rise are powerful forces that shape barrier island geomorphology and habitats (for example, beach, dune, marsh, and forest). Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010 are two major events that have affected habitats...

Manatees are a vulnerable, charismatic sentinel species from the evolutionarily divergent Afrotheria. Manatee health and resistance to infectious disease is of great concern to conservation groups, but little is known about their immune system. To develop manatee-specific tools for monitoring health, we first must have a general knowledge of how the immunoglobulin heavy (IgH) chain locus...

The framework presented herein supports a changing paradigm in the approaches used by coastal researchers, engineers, and social scientists to model the impacts of climate change and sea level rise (SLR) in particular along low-gradient coastal landscapes. Use of a System of Systems (SoS) approach to the coastal dynamics of SLR is encouraged to capture the nonlinear feedbacks and dynamic...

Global mercury contamination largely results from direct primary atmospheric and secondary legacy emissions, which can be deposited to ecosystems, converted to methylmercury, and bioaccumulated along food chains. We examined organic horizon soil samples collected across an elevational gradient on Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondack region of New York State, USA to determine spatial...

This report presents the results of a cooperative study by the U.S. Geological Survey and Missouri Department of Natural Resources to estimate total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) concentrations at monitoring sites within and near the Lower Grand River hydrological unit. The primary objectives of the study were to quantify temporal changes in TN and TP concentrations and compare...

Multiyear remote sensing mapping of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was carried out as an indicator of live biomass composition of the Phragmites australis (hereafter Phragmites) marsh in the lower Mississippi River Delta (hereafter delta) from 2014 to 2017. Maps of NDVI change showed that the Phragmites condition was fairly stable between May 2014 and July 2015. From...

A large body of theory predicts that populations diffusing in heterogeneous environments reach higher total size than if non-diffusing, and, paradoxically, higher size than in a corresponding homogeneous environment. However, this theory and its assumptions have not been rigorously tested. Here, we extended previous theory to include exploitable resources, proving qualitatively novel...