Publications

The Mississippi River Delta, the tip of the longest river in North America, is located in the coastal plains of southeastern Louisiana. The study area included in the Mississippi River Delta vignette of southeastern Louisiana follows the Mississippi River southward from Port Sulphur within the modern Plaquemines-Balize Delta lobe (Figure 1). It extends eastward through Long Bay into...

Land use changes often create in situ stress and eventual mortality in mangroves as unsuitable hydroperiods are created through tidal flow alterations. Here, we document mangrove forest and soil structural changes within transects established in tidally restricted areas on Marco Island (Collier County, Florida, USA), which has broad swaths of dead-standing or unhealthy mangroves (“ghost...

Despite being one of the most prevalent forms of consumerism in ecological communities, parasitism has largely been excluded from food-web models. Stable isotope analysis of consumers and their diets has been widely used in the study of food webs for decades. However, the amount of information regarding parasite stable isotope ecology is limited, restricting the ability of ecologists to...

Identifying spawning grounds of Asian carp is important for determining the reproductive front of invasive populations. Ichthyoplankton monitoring along the Illinois Waterway (IWW) has provided information on abundances of Asian carp eggs in the IWW's navigation pools. Post-fertilization times derived from egg development stages and water temperatures can be used to estimate spawning...

Regional regression is a common tool used to estimate daily flow-duration curves (FDCs) at ungaged locations. In this report, several refinements to a particular implementation of the regional regression method for estimating FDCs are evaluated by consideration of different methodological options through a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure in the 19 major river basins of the...

Deep-sea corals can create a highly complex, three-dimensional structure that facilitates sediment accumulation and influences adjacent sediment environments through altered hydrodynamic regimes. Infaunal communities adjacent to different coral types, including reef-building scleractinian corals and individual colonies of octocorals, are known to exhibit higher macrofaunal densities and...

Non-native grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) have been stocked in the United States for vegetation control since the 1970s, and recent evidence suggests some natural reproduction in the Great Lakes basin. Despite all states and provinces bordering Lake Erie either banning grass carp or requiring imports of only sterile, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)-certified triploids, the...

Few if any natural resource systems are completely understood and fully observed. Instead, there almost always is uncertainty about the way a system works and its status at any given time, which can limit effective management. A natural approach to uncertainty is to allocate time and effort to the collection of additional data, on the reasonable assumption that more information will...

Conversion of wild habitats to human dominated landscape is a major cause of biodiversity loss. An approach to mitigate the impact of habitat loss consists of designating reserves where habitat is preserved and managed. Determining the most valuable areas to preserve in a landscape is called the reserve design problem. There exists several possible formulations of the reserve design...

As part of a long-term cooperative program to monitor water quality within the Scituate Reservoir watershed, the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the Providence Water Supply Board collected streamflow and water-quality data at the Scituate Reservoir and tributaries. Streamflow and concentrations of chloride and sodium estimated from records of specific conductance were used to...

A detailed review of historical literature and museum data revealed that flathead catfish were not historically native in the Great Lakes Basin, with the possible exception of a relict population in Lake Erie. The species has invaded Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, nearly all drainages in Michigan, and the Fox/Wolf and Milwaukee drainages in Wisconsin. They have not been collected...

A series of 15 digital flood-inundation maps was developed for a 10.2-mile reach of the Pawtuxet River in the municipalities of West Warwick, Warwick, and Cranston, Rhode Island, by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The coverage of the maps extends downstream from Natick Pond dam near...