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To increase the resilience of salt marshes subject to sea-level rise impacts, managers can focus on interventions within current marsh footprints or in adjacent uplands to facilitate landward marsh migration. The latter approach may be more appropriate when degradation is severe ...

Conductivity is an important indicator of the health of aquatic ecosystems. We model large amounts of lake conductivity data collected as part of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's National Lakes Assessment using spatial indexing, a flexible and efficient approac...

Now more than ever, complex socio-ecological challenges require timely and integrated responses from scientists and policymakers. Air quality is one such challenge. Under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency establishes ambient air quality standards to prot...

Amphibians worldwide are threatened by habitat loss, some of which is driven by a changing climate, as well as exposure to pesticides, among other causes. The timing and duration of the larval development phase vary between species, thereby influencing the relative impacts of sto...

Salt marshes, critical habitats offering many ecosystem services, are threatened by development, accelerated sea level rise (SLR) and other anthropogenic stressors that are projected to worsen. As seas rise, some salt marshes can migrate inland if there is adj...

Reliable estimates of low flow and flood discharge at ungaged locations are required for evaluating stream flow alteration, designing culverts and stream crossings, and for interpreting regional surveys of habitat and biotic condition.  The majority of locations where discha...

Global declines in mangroves, seagrasses, and corals threaten the provisioning of ecosystem services to coastal communities. However, potential feedbacks between these ecosystems are poorly understood owing to a lack of studies exploring functional links between these frequently ...

Wildland fires pose an environmental challenge that hasbeen growing in recent years, as wildfires increase inmagnitude and the use of prescribed fire has expanded toreduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Fire is also usedthroughout the world for reducing agricultural waste and...

Attribution of the ocean acidification (OA) signal in estuarine carbonate system observations is necessary for quantifying the impacts of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions on water quality, and informing managers of the efficacy of potential mitigation options. We present a...

Critical loads (CLs) are frequently used to quantify terrestrial ecosystem impacts from nitrogen (N) deposition using ecological responses such as the growth and mortality of tree species. Typically, CLs are reported as a single value, with uncertainty, for an indicator across a ...

Environmental management decisions often aim to maintain ecosystems in a healthy and resilient condition while providing the ecosystem goods and services that humans want and need. Models, methods, frameworks, and metrics are needed to characterize and forecast the potential bene...

Wildfires in western US forests increased over the last two decades, resulting in elevated solid and nutrient loadings to streams, and occasionally threatening drinking water supplies. We demonstrated that a linked LANDIS (LANDscape DIsturbance and Succession)-VELMA (Visualizing ...

Under the best circumstances, achieving or sustaining optimum ecological conditions in estuaries is challenging. Persistent information gaps in estuarine data make it difficult to differentiate natural variability from potential regime shifts. Long-term monitoring is critical for...

Salt marsh restoration has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions thereby providing an opportunity for blue carbon crediting, but implementation has been limited to date because of insufficient data and validation. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential scale of me...

The interactive and cumulative impacts of climate change on natural resources such as coral reefs present numerous challenges for conservation planning and management. Climate change adaptation is complex due to climate-stressor interactions across multiple spatial and temporal s...

Coral reef resilience is eroding at multiple spatial scales globally, with broad implications for coastal communities, and is thus a critical challenge for managing marine social-ecological systems (SESs). Many researchers believe that external stressors will cause key coral reef...

Climate change could add a variety of uncertainties to hydrological processes and water resources. Very limited efforts have been devoted to applying the US-EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)’s Hydrologic and Water Quality System (HAWQS) model for predicting climate chan...

Fertilizer-intensive agriculture leads to emissions of reactive nitrogen (Nr), posing threats to climate via nitrous oxide (N2O) and to air quality and human health via nitric oxide (NO) and ammonia (NH3) that form ozone and particulate matter (PM) downwind. Adding nitrification ...

Climate change and atmospheric deposition of nitrogen (N) and sulfur (S) impact the health and productivity of forests. Here, we explored the potential impacts of these environmental stressors on ecosystem services provided by future forests in the contiguous U.S. We found that a...

Terrestrial organisms and ecosystems are being exposed to new and rapidly changing combinations of solar UV radiation and other environmental factors because of ongoing changes in stratospheric ozone and climate. In this Quadrennial Assessment, we examine the interactive effects ...

The integrated forest ecosystem model ForSAFE-Veg was used to simulate soil processes and understory vegetation composition at three—sugar maple, beech, yellow birch—hardwood forest sites in the Northeastern United States (one at Hubbard Brook, NH, and two at Bear Bro...

Historical deposition of nitrogen (N) and sulfur (S) over the Eastern United States has impacted ecosystem structure and function. The potential for recovery of ecosystems is relatively uncertain, with deposition paired with future climate change contributing to this uncertainty....

Variations in stratospheric ozone and changes in the aquatic environment by climate change and human activity are modifying the exposure of aquatic ecosystems to UV radiation. These shifts in exposure have consequences for the distributions of species, biogeochemical cycles, and ...

Understanding and predicting the quality of inland waters are challenging, particularly in the context of intensifying climate extremes expected in the future. These challenges arise partly due to complex processes that regulate water quality, and arduous and expensive data colle...

Human activity has significantly increased the deposition of nitrogen (N) on terrestrial ecosystems over pre-industrial levels leading to a multitude of effects including losses of biodiversity, changes in ecosystem functioning, and impacts on human well-being. It is challenging ...