Geology topics

Research about California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington

Source-linked reports with geographic coverage including California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2023

Wildfire-induced shifts in groundwater discharge to streams identified with paired air and stream water temperature analyses

Within the western United States, increasingly severe and frequent wildfires may alter the magnitude, timing, and quality of water exported from burned areas by streams. Post-fire hydrologic studies often focus on peak stream flow responses to shifts in runoff generation or on annual streamflow yield response to changes in evapotranspiration following fire. However, the magnitude and duration of wildfire effects on groundwater recharge, changes in subsurface routing, and consequences for stream low flows sourced predominately by baseflow are poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate an approach using the amplitude and phase of paired annual air and stream water temperature signals to broadly identify changes in watershed subsurface flow contributions after fire. Watersheds were classified using pre-fire temperature data, as having air-coupled (i.e., reduced apparent groundwater signature), deep groundwater, or shallow groundwater stream temperature signals. Changes in pre- and post-fire paired air and stream water temperature metrics were compared for locations (n = 17) spanning a large range of physiographic and climatic conditions across the western United States. Pre- and post-fire comparisons were computed by quantile using bootstrapped confidence intervals (ci = 95), as well as in aggregate using Kruskal-Wallis and post-hoc Dunn tests. Statistical comparisons of pre- and post-fire temperature metrics suggest that overall, watersheds classified as having minimal groundwater influence are the most likely to experience fire-induced subsurface hydrologic change. More specifically, watersheds classified as having air-coupled or shallow groundwater signals experienced increases in the magnitude of groundwater discharge, with more stable annual thermal regimes post-fire that are less-coupled to ambient air temperature. These findings form the basis of a conceptual framework for watershed resistance to subsurface hydrologic change following fire that can be broadly applied as a first approximation for water management, impacts on aquatic habitat, and post-wildfire response planning.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2020

Drivers and projections of ice phenology in mountain lakes in the western United States

Climate change is causing rapid warming and altered precipitation patterns in mountain watersheds, both of which influence the timing of ice breakup in mountain lakes. To enable predictions of ice breakup in the future, we analyzed a dataset of mountain lake ice breakup dates derived from remote sensing and historical downscaled climate data. We evaluated drivers of ice breakup, constructed a predictive statistical model, and developed projections of mountain lake ice breakup date with global climate models. Using Random Forest analysis, we determined that winter and spring cumulative snow fraction (portion of precipitation falling as snow) and air temperature are the strongest predictors of ice breakup on mountain lakes. Interactions between precipitation, cumulative winter air temperature and lake surface area indicate that shifts in air temperature and precipitation affect smaller lakes (< 2 km 2 ) more than larger lakes (> 2–10 km 2 ). A linear mixed effects model (RMSE of 18 d), applied with an ensemble of 15 global climate models, projected that end-of-century ice breakup in mountain lakes will be earlier by 25 ± 4 and 61 ± 5 (mean ± SE) days for representative concentration pathways 4.5 and 8.5, respectively.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2020

Review of trap-and-haul for managing Pacific salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) in impounded river systems

High-head dams are migration barriers for Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. in many river systems and recovery measures for impacted stocks are limited. Trap-and-haul has been widely used in attempts to facilitate recovery but information from existing programs has not been synthesized to inform improvements to aid recovery of salmonids in systems with high-head dams. We reviewed 17 trap-and-haul programs regarding Pacific salmon to: (1) summarize information about facility design, operation and biological effects; (2) identify critical knowledge gaps; and (3) evaluate trap-and-haul as a current and future management tool. Existing programs are operated to address a range of management goals including restoring access to historical habitats, temporarily reducing exposure to dangerous in-river conditions, and reintroducing ecological processes upstream from dams. Information gathered from decades of operation on facility design criteria and fish handling protocols, and robust literature on fish collection and passage are available. While many aspects of trap-and-haul have been evaluated, effects on population productivity and sustainability remain poorly understood. Long-term and systematic studies of trap-and-haul outcomes are rare, and assessments can be confounded by concurrent management actions and broad ecological and climatic effects. Existing data suggest that performance and effectiveness vary among programs and over various time scales within programs. Although critical information gaps exist, trap-and-haul is an important management and conservation tool for providing Pacific salmonids access to historical habitats. Successful application of trap-and-haul programs requires long-term commitment and an adaptive management approach by dam owners and stakeholders, and careful planning of new programs.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2019

North American Bat Monitoring Program regional protocol for surveying with stationary deployments of echolocation recording devices: Narrative version 1.0, Pacific Northwestern US

The outbreak of white-nose syndrome (WNS) and the growing awareness of the risks to bats from wind power generating facilities have driven radical changes to North American bat conservation. Over the last decade, formerly common species such as the little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) and hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) have experienced unprecedented mortality rates and are now facing non-trivial extinction risk. In response to this change, federal land management agencies such as the US National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, US Bureau of Land Management and state wildlife management agencies such as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Idaho Fish and Game have invested in collaborative, interagency bat monitoring to close the gap in information about bat welfare and to inform bat conservation strategies. Bats are notoriously difficult to track and study and there remains a paucity of fundamental information about the seasonal patterns of bat activity and habitat use and population distributions and abundances. Moreover, because bats are so highly mobile and difficult to survey (e.g., nocturnal flight), this information needs to be contextualized at broad regional (e.g., 10,000 km2) and range-wide extents. Delimiting bat populations at local scales (e.g., 100 km2) is very difficult and it is not clear, for example, how a declining trend in local (e.g., a small park unit) patterns of bat activity or relative abundance should be interpreted without broader context. In recognition of these challenges, a plan for coordinated continental-scale monitoring of bats, the North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) was developed (Loeb et al. 2015). The centerpiece of the plan is the use of a spatially-balanced randomized master sample of grid-cell sample units from a grid-based sampling frame to provide the architecture for collaboration and the statistical foundation for making inferences about bat populations across broad regions and entire bat geographic ranges. The plan outlines general goals, survey design, and field methods for both summertime acoustic surveys of bats as well as winter and summer counts of bats in hibernacula and maternity colonies but it does not provide field-level protocol and standard operating procedures for consistent and efficient implementation. This regional protocol provides these details for one component of NABat, the deployment of stationary acoustic detectors to record bats during summer, as is called for by the NABat plan. This protocol was written specifically to provide guidance and consistency across the Pacific Northwestern US (N. California [California Department of Fish and Wildlife Northern Region], Idaho, Washington, and Oregon; US Fish and Wildlife Service Region 1 and portion of Region 8 [in Northern California and Klamath Basin]; US Forest Service Region 6 and portions of Regions 1 and 5 in Idaho; and the Upper Columbia Basin, North Coast Cascades, and Klamath Networks of the National Park Service). This region has internal cohesion, sharing a distinct bat faunal assemblage of 15 species (with several additional species occurring on the southern periphery of the region), and a long history of collaborative bat monitoring beginning with the interagency Bat Grid Program which operated from 2003-2010 across Oregon and Washington (US Forest Service Region 6). This protocol will be coordinated and implemented by the Northwestern Bat Hub, on behalf of the collective interagency partnership. The Northwestern Bat Hub is housed on the Oregon State University-Cascades campus and leverages pooled partner funds and resources to maintain a small staff that coordinates and conducts monitoring, provides training and oversight, ensures high-quality data quality and control, and analyzes data and reports on results.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2017

Longitudinal thermal heterogeneity in rivers and refugia for coldwater species: Effects of scale and climate change

Climate-change driven increases in water temperature pose challenges for aquatic organisms. Predictions of impacts typically do not account for fine-grained spatiotemporal thermal patterns in rivers. Patches of cooler water could serve as refuges for anadromous species like salmon that migrate during summer. We used high-resolution remotely sensed water temperature data to characterize summer thermal heterogeneity patterns for 11,308 km of second–seventh-order rivers throughout the Pacific Northwest and northern California (USA). We evaluated (1) water temperature patterns at different spatial resolutions, (2) the frequency, size, and spacing of cool thermal patches suitable for Pacific salmon (i.e., contiguous stretches ≥ 0.25 km, ≤ 15 °C and ≥ 2 °C, aooler than adjacent water), and (3) potential influences of climate change on availability of cool patches. Thermal heterogeneity was nonlinearly related to the spatial resolution of water temperature data, and heterogeneity at fine resolution (< 1 km) would have been difficult to quantify without spatially continuous data. Cool patches were generally > 2.7 and < 13.0 km long, and spacing among patches was generally > 5.7 and < 49.4 km. Thermal heterogeneity varied among rivers, some of which had long uninterrupted stretches of warm water ≥ 20 °C, and others had many smaller cool patches. Our models predicted little change in future thermal heterogeneity among rivers, but within-river patterns sometimes changed markedly compared to contemporary patterns. These results can inform long-term monitoring programs as well as near-term climate-adaptation strategies.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2015

Rethinking the longitudinal stream temperature paradigm: region-wide comparison of thermal infrared imagery reveals unexpected complexity of river temperatures

Prevailing theory suggests that stream temperature warms asymptotically in a downstream direction, beginning at the temperature of the source in the headwaters and leveling off downstream as it converges to match meteorological conditions. However, there have been few empirical examples of longitudinal patterns of temperature in large rivers due to a paucity of data. We constructed longitudinal thermal profiles (temperature versus distance) for 53 rivers in the Pacific Northwest (USA) using an extensive dataset of remotely sensed summertime river temperatures and classified each profile into one of five patterns of downstream warming: asymptotic (increasing then flattening), linear (increasing steadily), uniform (not changing), parabolic (increasing then decreasing), or complex (not fitting other classes). We evaluated (1) how frequently profiles warmed asymptotically downstream as expected, and (2) whether relationships between river temperature and common hydroclimatic variables differed by profile class. We found considerable diversity in profile shape, with 47% of rivers warming asymptotically, and 53% having alternative profile shapes. Water temperature did not warm substantially over the course of the river for coastal parabolic and uniform profiles, and for some linear and complex profiles. Profile classes showed no clear geographical trends. The degree of correlation between river temperature and hydroclimatic variables differed among profile classes, but there was overlap among classes. Water temperature in rivers with asymptotic or parabolic profiles was positively correlated with August air temperature, tributary temperature and velocity, and negatively correlated with elevation, August precipitation, gradient, and distance upstream. Conversely, associations were less apparent in rivers with linear, uniform, or complex profiles. Factors contributing to the unique shape of parabolic profiles differed for coastal and inland rivers, where downstream cooling was influenced locally by climate or cool water inputs, respectively. Potential drivers of shape for complex profiles were specific to each river. These thermal patterns indicate diverse thermal habitats that may promote resilience of aquatic biota to climate change. Without this spatial context, climate change models may incorrectly estimate loss of thermally suitable habitat.

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2010

Lead isotope database of unpublished results from sulfide mineral occurrences — California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington

The Pb isotope database for sulfide deposits and occurrences in the Western United States was funded by the Mineral Resources Program, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Reports on Pb isotope data from Alaska were published in Church and others (1987a) and Gaccetta and Church (1989). The primary objectives of the project were three-fold: * To utilize Pb isotope signatures, in conjunction with the regional mapping, to assess the relative ages and to categorize the types of deposits studied, * To relate the Pb isotope and trace-element geochemical signatures of specific deposits and occurrences to ore-forming processes, and * To use the Pb isotope data to correlate lithotectonic terranes within the northern Cordillera. The report by Church and others (1987b) shows how this fingerprinting methodology can be applied to trace the offset of lithostratigraphic terranes

California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington↗