A Few Words . . . Some writing samples:

Great Outdoors Month: Exploring the Waters

Now that June is upon us, it’s Great Outdoors Month! So why not stream some Nature instead of Netflix? Speaking of streams, maybe you’re thinking of going kayaking, canoeing or tubing on a nearby river. Just go with the flow!

Before you go, you’ll probably check the weather.  Did you know that it’s also possible to check the water conditions of your favorite river or stream? That’s thanks to the more than 8,400 USGS streamgages located in all 50 states and territories that monitor streamflow year-round.

Streamgages tell you how high the water is, how much water is flowing, and if the river is in flood or drought conditions. Although they’re helpful for knowing if conditions will be just right for your tubing excursion, these streamgages have a broader role to play in society. Information on the flow of rivers and streams is a vital national asset that safeguards lives, protects property, and helps ensure adequate water supplies for the future. 

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In the Field with Kate Scharer

What’s a day in the life of a research geologist like?

What’s a day in the life of a research geologist like? I asked Dr. Kate Scharer, who studies the timing and size of prehistoric earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault and other active faults in southern California, if I could tag along with her one day. To my surprise, a few days later I was in the field looking at seismic faults.

Scharers’s area of expertise is “paleoseismology,” the study of old earthquakes. Old as in hundreds to thousands of years old. She works to understand how often big quakes happen on faults and the geologic slip rate on active faults in southern California.  To do this, she combines Quaternary geochronologic data with field mapping and Light Detection and Ranging (or LiDAR) analysis. Which means that she uses chemical techniques to determine the age of ancient landforms displaced by faulting and measures the amount of fault displacement by measuring offsets of surface features from photographs and precision topographic maps produced by laser scanners. More on that later.    

We were on the road by 7:30 a.m. on a chilly autumn morning with strong Santa Ana winds. Scharer had already packed all her usual equipment: short shovel, field notebook, hammer, precision GPS devices, and a cell phone loaded with maps of the area–fault lines marked.  Within the hour, Kate, with me in tow, was out in the field doing reconnaissance work at Deukmejian Wilderness Park on the Sierra Madre Fault.

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A is for Amphibian

Did you know that the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area is the biological research arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior?    

USGS Ecosystems Mission Area scientists are leading research and monitoring efforts across the country and in some cases around the globe. Studying topics from amphibians to zoonotic diseases, they provide natural resource managers with the information and data needed to make decisions about the nation’s wildlife and wild places. In the Ecosystems A-Z series, we’ll share just some of the work our scientists are leading from A-Z, let’s start with amphibians.

Salamanders, frogs, toads and caecilians (which are limbless and snake-like in appearance) are all amphibians. The United States is home to approximately 300 of the world’s estimated 8,000 amphibian species. The number of known species changes periodically as new species are discovered, and new genetic techniques, like molecular genetics, allow scientists to distinguish among species that are genetically distinct but look the same as other species.

Amphibians are both predator and prey and are considered good indicators of general ecosystem health because of their close association with multiple habitats and sensitivity to different environmental stressors. They can be found in habitats as varied as deserts, prairies, forests and mountains.

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People of the Sage

Meet one of the People of the Sage, Dr. Anna Chalfoun, Assistant USGS Cooperative Research Unit Leader and Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming. Don’t let the titles intimidate you, Anna Chalfoun loves all types of hockey, loves horses—all animals really! Even snakes.

She just finished reading “Circe” by Madeline Miller and is about to start “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life” by David Quammen. And some of the songs on her playlist right now include “Cake by the Ocean” by DNCE, “Just Breathe” by Pearl Jam, and “Little Red Wagon” by Miranda Lambert. A coffee drinker, who fell in love with espresso in Italy last year, Chalfoun’s primary focus is on understanding the processes and factors that influence wildlife-habit relationships. Her work in the sagebrush steppe spans disciplines of ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation biology, and diverse taxa including birds, small mammals, and amphibians and reptiles.

Meet Dr. Anna Chalfoun, in her own words:

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Expect the Unexpected: Geology and Maya Warfare

An unexpected thing happened on the way to publishing a geology research paper recently.

An unexpected thing happened on the way to publishing a geology research paper recently. USGS scientist David Wahl, whose research focuses on reconstructing climate-related and man-made environmental change in North and Central America, was producing late-Holocene (the last 2,000 years) climate and land change reconstructions using data and geologic samples from northern Guatemala, when he and his fellow researchers uncovered the first geologic evidence of pre-Hispanic Maya warfare.

It was an unexpected discovery on two fronts. First, Wahl was looking for evidence of climate extremes in his data, not warfare; and second, the discovery changes the way archeologists look at the Maya warfare timeline.

Wahl, who’s been doing climate reconstruction research for the last 20 years in Central America, worked with archeologists to piece together the history.

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