Publications

The Floridan aquifer system (FAS) is receiving increased attention as a result of regulatory restrictions on water-supply withdrawals and treated wastewater management practices. The South Florida Water Management District’s Regional Water Availability Rule, adopted in 2007, restricts urban withdrawals from the shallower Biscayne aquifer to pre-April 2006 levels throughout southeast...

Resource managers need to make decisions to plan for future environmental conditions, particularly sea level rise, in the face of substantial uncertainty. Many interacting processes factor in to the decisions they face. Advances in process models and the quantification of uncertainty have made models a valuable tool for this purpose. Long-simulation runtimes and, often, numerical...

In 2012, a map of vegetation communities on Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge was expanded based on interpretation of aerial photographs and field data. National Agricultural Imagery Program aerial photographs were used to identify distinct communities on previously unmapped refuge units and newly acquired parcels. Newly mapped polygons were then visited to adjust map...

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has proposed dredging a 13-mile reach of the St. Johns River navigation channel in Jacksonville, Florida, deepening it to depths between 50 and 54 feet below North American Vertical Datum of 1988. The dredging operation will remove about 10 feet of sediments from the surficial aquifer system, including limestone in some locations. The limestone...

No abstract available.

The U.S. Geological Survey anchored a sediment trap in the northern Gulf of Mexico to collect seasonal time-series data on the flux and assemblage composition of live planktic foraminifers. This report provides an update of the previous time-series data to include results from 2011. Ten species, or varieties, constituted ~92 percent of the 2011 assemblage: Globigerinoides ruber (pink and...

This paper reconciles the difference in the projections of the wet season over the Southeastern United States (SEUS) from a global climate model (the Community Climate System Model Version 3 [CCSM3]) and from a regional climate model (the Regional Spectral Model [RSM]) nested in the CCSM3. The CCSM3 projects a dipole in the summer precipitation anomaly: peninsular Florida dries in the...

Exploration of unconventional natural gas reservoirs such as impermeable shale basins through the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has changed the energy landscape in the USA providing a vast new energy source. The accelerated production of natural gas has triggered a debate concerning the safety and possible environmental impacts of these operations. This study...

Limited information is available regarding the role of minerals and heavy metals in the morbidity and mortality of manatees. Whole-blood and serum mineral concentrations were evaluated in apparently healthy, free-ranging Florida (Trichechus manatus latirostris, n = 31) and Belize (Trichechus manatus manatus, n = 14) manatees. Toxicologic statuses of the animals and of their environment...

The Nonindigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) database (http://nas.er.usgs.gov) functions as a national repository and clearinghouse for occurrence data for introduced species within the United States. Included is locality information on over 1,100 species of vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants introduced as early as 1850. Taxa include foreign (exotic) species and species native to...

Wetlands are widely recognized as sentinels of global climate change. Long-term monitoring data combined with process-based modeling has the potential to shed light on key processes and how they change over time. This paper reports the development and application of a simple water balance model based on long-term climate, soil, vegetation and hydrological dynamics to quantify groundwater...

High-resolution (downscaled) projections of future climate conditions are critical inputs to a wide variety of ecological and socioeconomic models and are created using numerous different approaches. Here, we conduct a sensitivity analysis of spatial predictions from climate envelope models for threatened and endangered vertebrates in the southeastern United States to determine whether...