GPS

The 2020 fire season in western North American was among the most extreme on record.

Tidal marsh wetlands worldwide have been lost due to human impacts. Tidal marshes are critical to many wildlife taxa and have become the focus of many restoration projects. In the Suisun Marsh of California, part of the San Francisco Bay Estuary and the largest brackish marsh on the U.S.

As part of a broader trial of noninvasive methods to research wild wolves (Canis lupus) in the Superior National Forest (SNF), Minnesota, the USGS Wolf and Deer Project (Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center) explored whether wolves could be remotely monitored using a new, inexpensive (approximately $80 USD in 2019), remotely deployable, passive acoustic recording device.

Disturbances to animals can cause changes in behavior. Therefore, it is critical for wildlife managers to understand what disturbances may impact animals and how animals adapt to them. USGS scientists analyzed the relationship between human-based disturbance and animal movement and habitat use.

Waterfowl rely on continent-wide wetland networks supporting migratory pathways that connect important breeding and wintering grounds. Globally, 30 to 90% of these networks are threatened or have been heavily modified or destroyed by human development.

In 2018, members of the USGS Western Ecological Research Center (WERC) Dixon Field Station attached Global Positioning System-Global System for Mobile Communication (GPS-GSM) accelerometer transmitters to 257 geese and 300 ducks to monitor migration patterns and behavior, with the end goal of providing timely and actionable data for their project cooperators.

The USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center uses Very High Frequency (VHF) and Global Positioning System (GPS) radio collars to study white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and gray wolf (Canis lupus) movements, ecology, and populations in the Superior National Forest (SNF) of northeastern Minnesota.

Wolves are born into packs. Similar to the dynamics of human families, young members of both sexes leave their natal families as they reach maturity and strike out on their own.  These “lone wolves” travel far and wide seeking a mate and new territory.  In northeastern Minnesota’s saturated wolf population, few areas are unclaimed by existing wolf packs, so lone dispersing wolves often “float” within the populations for long periods.

Multiple agencies in the San Diego area have the responsibility to effectively manage the water supply in this arid, urban, densely populated, coastal basin in southern California. Recently, five additional groundwater production wells were constructed to increase the water supply; the new wells are scheduled to begin pumping in 2017. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 (SGMA) provides a framework to comprehensively measure and manage groundwater.

The locations of existing and proposed water pipelines in multi-county tribal water systems in North and South Dakota are being mapped and documented in pipeline mapbooks.  The 2014 National Agricultural Image Program (NAIP) Orthoimagery was used as the basis for pipeline mapbooks, which can include over 2,000 pages. The pipeline data have been collected using field Global Positioning Systems (from Bartlett & West Engineering for this mapbook). Pipelines are depicted as existing Main and Secondary sections and planned Design pipelines.