Science Inventory

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Difficulty in diatom species identification and nomenclature can lead to major inconsistencies in taxonomic datasets. These inconsistencies may hinder the use of diatoms in large-extent bioassessments such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA) National Aq...

Stable isotope ratios integrate, indicate, record, and trace fundamental processes in hydrology and ecology.  Stored within the atoms of samples, stable isotope ratios of specific elements unlock stories about ecological processes that impact water quality and quantity.&nbsp...

Under the best of 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 key for t...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is conducting a national stated preference study that aims to quantify the total economic value (human use and existence value) of water quality policies across the conterminous US (CONUS). Previous work identified the ratio of obser...

Under the Clean Water Act, EPA is mandated with assessing the physical, chemical, and biological condition of lakes within the USA. The hydrologic water balance strongly influences the ecological condition of lakes through its control on lake volume, surface area, and water quali...

Anthropogenic impacts on lake and stream water quality are well established but have been much less studied in wetlands.  Here we use data from the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment to characterize water quality and its relationship to anthropogenic pressure for inl...

Abstract/presentation for a the session “Methods and Data for Cumulative Impact Assessment in the Context of Environmental Justice” at the 2023 North America SETAC 44th Annual Meeting (November 12-16, 2023).  Invited to contribute a talk highlighting the National...

Stream macroinvertebrate assemblages are shaped by natural and human-related factors that operate through complex hierarchical pathways. Quantifying these relationships can support stream ecological assessment. We applied a structural equation modeling framework to evaluate hypot...

Presentation to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (OR DEQ) for their "Thirsty for Knowledge" webinar series

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is conducting a national stated preference study that seeks to quantify the non-use (existence) portion of total economic value of water quality policies across the conterminous US (CONUS). Previous work identified the ratio of obser...

Following Executive Order 14072 issued in April 2022, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of Management and Budget, and Department of Commerce published the final National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions (National Strategy) in J...

Channel dimensions (width and depth) at varying flows influence a host of instream ecological processes, as well as habitat and biotic features; they are a major consideration in stream habitat restoration and instream flow assessments. Models of widths and depths are often used ...

Under the Clean Water Act, EPA is mandated with assessing the physical, chemical, and biological condition of lakes within the USA. The hydrologic water balance strongly influences the ecological condition of lakes through its control on lake volume, surface area, and water quali...

This paper evaluates the relationships between recent shifts in the form (oxidized vs. reduced) of N deposition and watershed and stream chemistry by coupling estimates of N deposition with stream measurements from the U.S. EPA National Rivers and Streams Assessment (NRSA; three ...

Wetland soils contain some of the densest stores of carbon in the biosphere.  However, there is little understanding of the quantity and distribution of carbon stored in US wetlands, or how these stocks change over time. The 2011 and 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessmen...

The EPA’s National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS) assesses the condition of the nation’s waters and identifies which stressors are responsible for adverse condition.  For most of the freshwater surveys, a relative risk approach is used, but it cannot be applied ...

This report presents the results of the second National Wetland Condition Assessment. Data were collected in 2016.

Documenting trends of stream macroinvertebrate biodiversity is challenging because biomonitoring often has limited spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scopes. We analyzed biodiversity and composition of assemblages of >500 genera, spanning 27 years, and 6131 stream sites across f...

Biotic indices from aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages provide an integrated picture of ecosystem condition. As such, for assessment and management questions, there is value in developing a mechanistic understanding of how natural and anthropogenic drivers affect macroinverteb...

REGIONAL PATTERNS AND DRIVERS OF FLOW ALTERATION IN U.S. RIVERS AND STREAMS BASED ON CHANNEL MORPHOLOGY FROM EPA’S NATIONAL AQUATIC RESOURCE SURVEYS Flow alterations in rivers and streams have great potential to adversely affect physical habitat, water quality, and biologic...

This workshop will teach users how to create a probabilistic survey design and analyze the resulting data using the R package spsurvey. This package was developed specifically for this purpose and implements the Generalized Random Tessellation Stratified (GRTS) algorithm used to ...

Wetland soils contain some of the densest stores of carbon in the biosphere, but there is little understanding of the quantity and distribution of carbon stored in US wetlands, or how these stocks change over time. Furthermore, wetlands are increasingly threatened by anthropogeni...

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses a water quality index (WQI) to estimate benefits of proposed Clean Water Act regulations. The WQI is relevant to human use value, such as recreation, but may not fully capture aspects of nonuse value, such as existence value. Here...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been identified as one of the top medical issues worldwide, leading many countries to place greater emphasis on combating resistant bacteria through a multipronged, coordinated approach.  A consensus has emerged among the greater public hea...

StreamCat is a centralized dataset of watershed characteristics built to assist researchers and managers in sustainability of our Nation’s waters.  StreamCat is a published dataset characterizing the watershed features of ~2.65 million stream segments within the conter...