The dispersants Corexit 9527 and Corexit 9500 were extensively used during the response to the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010. In addition to the monitoring programs established by federal and state governments, local communities also conducted studies to determine if chemical constituents from these dispersants impacted nearshore and inland waters. One community (the City of Orange Beach, ...

Water shortage can be caused by population growth that drives the growth of water demand for domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes. Water shortage in water-rich areas can be also caused by water pollution. The water problem caused by poor quality and insufficient quantity has been widely noted and well informed among the researchers, decision makers and ordinary people, but not much re...

Two destructive high-frequency sea level oscillation events occurred on June 13th, 2013 along the U.S. East Coast. Seafloor processes can be dismissed as the sources, as no concurrent offshore earthquakes or landslides were detected. Here, we present evidence that these tsunami-like events were generated by atmospheric mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) propagating from inland to offshore. The...

Sand dunes are unique ecosystems with distinct features which limited the accumulation of biomass. The distance from seashore affects both the physical properties of the sand dunes and the biota living above- and below ground. The goal of the present study was to determine the effects of the distance from shore to inland on soil bacterial community composition during wet and dry season. We stud...

Arctic plant communities are altered by climate changes. The magnitude of these alterations depends on whether species distributions are determined by macroclimatic conditions, by factors related to local topography, or by biotic interactions. Our current understanding of the relative importance of these conditions is limited due to the scarcity of studies, especially in the High Arctic. We inv...

A shift in chaparral species composition occurs from coastal to inland sites of the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California. Past studies have attributed this pattern to differential adaptations of chaparral species to gradients in moisture and solar radiation. We examined an alternate hypothesis, that shifts in species composition from coastal to inland sites is a result of differential ...

The mainly fresh water arboviral vector Aedes aegypti L. (Diptera: Culicidae) can also undergo pre-imaginal development in brackish water of up to 15 ppt (parts per thousand) salt in coastal areas. We investigated differences in salinity tolerance, egg laying preference, egg hatching and larval development times and resistance to common insecticides in Ae. aegypti collected from brackish and fr...