The parallel, finite-volume, unstructured-grid SUNTANS model has been employed to study the interaction of the tides with complex bathymetry in the macrotidal Snohomish River estuary. The unstructured grid resolves the large-scale, O(10 km) tidal dynamics of the estuary while employing 8 m grid-resolution at a specific region of interest in the vicinity of a confluence of two channels and exten...

The biological productivity of river-dominated estuaries is affected strongly by variation in freshwater inflow, which affects nursery habitat quality. Previous research has shown this is generally true in the upper San Francisco Estuary, California, USA; however, one endemic species of high management importance, delta smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus), has shown ambiguous population responses ...

Settling an Old Debate In their article “Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals,” Grollemund et al. (1) have accomplished more than just their stated intention: to identify the role of habitat in channeling the directions of the early Bantu farming settlement of the African equatorial rainforest. What is most important is that the authors essentially br...

Understanding environmental drivers of spatial patterns is an enduring ecological problem that is critical for effective biological conservation. Discontinuities (ecologically meaningful habitat breaks), both naturally occurring (e.g., river confluence, forest edge, dropoff) and anthropogenic (e.g., dams, roads), can influence the distribution of highly mobile organisms that have landor seascap...

The geochemical fingerprint of sediment retrieved from the banks of the River Manzanares as it passes through the City of Madrid is presented here. The river collects the effluent water from several Waste Water Treatment (WWT) plants in and around the city, such that, at low flows, up to 60% of the flow has been treated. A total of 18 bank-sediment cores were collected along the course of the r...

Sediment transport, erosion, and deposition are primary drivers of river geomorphic processes ecological services. Suspended-sediment concentration (SSC) is an important parameter for evaluating these accordingly significant interest to engineers, scientists, water resource managers. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) previously operated nine daily SSC gauging stations along the Mississ...

The combination of habitat loss, climate change, direct persecution, introduced species and other components of the global environmental crisis has resulted in a rapid loss of biodiversity, including species, population and genetic diversity. Birds, which inhabit a wide spectrum of different habitat types, are particularly sensitive to and indicative of environmental changes. The Caucasus endem...

The impact of agriculture, forestry and metal mining on the quality of fine-grained sediment (<63 μm) was investigated in the Quesnel River Basin (QRB) (~11,500 km(2)) in British Columbia, Canada. Samples of fine-grained sediment were collected monthly during the snow-free season in 2008 using time-integrated samplers at replicate sites representative of agriculture, forestry and mining activit...

Abstract The Miocene–Holocene dust sequences composing the Chinese Loess Plateau are one of Earth’s most complete terrestrial eolian sediment archives. Here we present a zircon Uranium-Lead geochronology dataset for sequence from northeastern plateau and compare results with those central plateau. These data show trend increasing spatial provenance contrast late Miocene to Pleistocene. This can...