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State policies can support renewable energy development by driving markets, providing certainty in the investment market, and incorporating the external benefits of the technologies into cost/benefit calculations. Using statistical analyses and policy design best practices, this paper quantifies the impact of state-level policies on renewable energy development in order to better understand the role of policy on development and inform policy makers on the policy mechanisms that provide maximum benefit. The results include the identification of connections between state policies and renewable energy development, as well as a discussion placing state policy efforts in context with other factors that influence the...
Geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, and enhanced oil and gas recovery have a clear role in U.S. energy policy, both in securing cost-effective energy and reducing atmospheric CO2 accumulations. Recent publicity surrounding induced seismicity at several geothermal and oil and gas sites points out the need to develop improved standards and practices to avoid issues that may unduly inhibit or stop the above technologies from fulfilling their full potential. It is critical that policy makers and the general community be assured that EGS, CO2 sequestration, enhanced oil/gas recovery, and other technologies relying on fluid injections, will be designed to reduce induced seismicity to an acceptable level, and be developed...
Summary 1. Historically, biogeographic barriers to the movement of aquatic organisms existed at multiple spatial scales and contributed to the development of unique regional faunas. At increasing spatial scales, these barriers consisted of waterfalls and cascades; catchment divides; major mountain ranges and oceans. This hierarchy of movement barriers produced increasingly distinct aquatic biotas at larger drainage units. 2. Humans have provided a variety of pathways by which aquatic species can circumvent historical biogeographic barriers. These include both authorised and unauthorised stocking, construction of canals and water conveyance systems, transport in ship ballast water, fishing and angling gear (including...
We quantified annual sediment deposition, bank erosion, and sediment budgets in nine riverine wetlands that represented a watershed continuum for 1 year in the unregulated Yampa River drainage basin in Colorado. One site was studied for 2 years to compare responses to peak flow variability. Annual mean sediment deposition ranged from 0.01 kg/m(2) along a first-order subalpine stream to 21.8 kg/m(2) at a sixth-order alluvial forest. Annual mean riverbank erosion ranged from 3 kg/m-of-bank at the first-order site to 1000 kg/m at the 6(th)-order site. Total sediment budgets were nearly balanced at six sites, while net export from bank erosion occurred at three sites. Both total sediment deposition (R(2) = 0.86, p <...
Wind energy offers the potential to reduce carbon emissions while increasing energy independence and bolstering economic development. However, wind energy has a larger land footprint per Gigawatt (GW) than most other forms of energy production, making appropriate siting and mitigation particularly important. Species that require large unfragmented habitats and those known to avoid vertical structures are particularly at risk from wind development. Developing energy on disturbed lands rather than placing new developments within large and intact habitats would reduce cumulative impacts to wildlife. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that it will take 241 GW of terrestrial based wind development on approximately...
If conservation of biodiversity is the goal, then the protected areas network of the continental US may be one of our best conservation tools for safeguarding ecological systems (i.e., vegetation communities). We evaluated representation of ecological systems in the current protected areas network and found insufficient representation at three vegetation community levels within lower elevations and moderate to high productivity soils. We used national-level data for ecological systems and a protected areas database to explore alternative ways we might be able to increase representation of ecological systems within the continental US. By following one or more of these alternatives it may be possible to increase the...
Conclusions:Report synthesizes scientific, planning, and policy-related aspects on the importance of land conservation in areas producing water for potable uses, including watersheds and aquifers. One critical finding indicated that if there is more forest cover in a watershed, water treatment costs are lower.Thresholds/Learnings:For every 10% increase in forest cover in the source area, treatment and chemical costs decreased by about 20%, up to about 60% forest cover. Treatment costs level off when forest cover is between 70-100%.
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Final Report - Executive Summary: This final project report is prepared to summarize the research project titled “Assessing evapotranspiration rate changes for proposed restoration of the forested uplands of the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC)” for the Desert LCC of the Bureau of Reclamation as a requirement for closing out the project. This report includes the scope of work, summary of research project, results, and conclusions.Among all of the components of the terrestrial water cycle, evapotranspiration (ET) consumes the largest amount of water. Accurate estimation of ET is very important to understand the influence of ET to the hydrologic response of recharge and runoff processes in the water...
Categories: Data, Publication; Types: Citation, Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2012, ATMOSPHERE, ATMOSPHERE, ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR, ATMOSPHERIC WATER VAPOR, All tags...
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Description: The upper Gila River in New Mexico is one of the few unobstructed rivers in the Colorado River Basin with largely intact native fish populations, including four federally listed and one state listed species.Freshwater systems throughout the West continue to be threatened by human encroachment and water development. Methodologies or decision support tools to evaluate resource management practices that foster an understanding of how fish species adapt to the effects of climate change are critical to future resource management planning.
The introduction of biofuels from biomass for transport purposes in an energy system model shows that bioethanol and vegetable oil can compete with oil products without subsidies provided prices of imported energy carriers are high, i.e. crude oil prices around $ 100/bbl. About half of the biomass will be used for motor fuel substitutes, whose share of the final energy in the transportation sector will increase to 10% in 2030. This gives rise to a nearly 9% drop in CO2 emissions in the transportation sector as compared to an emission balance where all real local emissions are fully counted. Despite a strong enhancement of biomass and biomass fuels and quite high prices for oil and gas up to 2030, BtL products like...
The state has different institutional capacities for providing finance capital to industrial sectors in different countries. These differences help explain the commercial nuclear energy sector's collapse in the United States and its success in France. The implications for institutional theories of political economy are explored. It is argued that to understand the state's ability to plan industrial development an analysis of its control over the processes of both internal and external capital formation is required.
State policies can support renewable energy development by driving markets, providing certainty in the investment market, and incorporating the external benefits of the technologies into cost/benefit calculations. Using statistical analyses and policy design best practices, this paper quantifies the impact of state-level policies on renewable energy development in order to better understand the role of policy on development and inform policy makers on the policy mechanisms that provide maximum benefit. The results include the identification of connections between state policies and renewable energy development, as well as a discussion placing state policy efforts in context with other factors that influence the...
The success of carbon capture, storage and sequestration as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy will be, in part, dependent on the regulatory framework used to govern its implementation. Creating a science-based regulatory framework that is designed with enough flexibility to encourage greenhouse gas offset activity, effective means of measuring the costs of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and ample protection for human and ecosystem health may prove challenging. For the purposes of this paper we will assume that there is an existing incentive to capture, store and sequester carbon and focus on how to regulate the process. Accounting practices and precursory crediting rules for biological sinks...
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have the potential to be an economic means of reducing direct (or tailpipe) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the transportation sector However, without a Climate policy that places a limit on CO2 emissions from the electric generation sector, the net impact of widespread deployment of PFIEVs on overall US CO2 emissions is not as clear. A comprehensive analysis must consider jointly the transportation and electricity sectors. along with feedbacks to the rest of the energy system. In this paper, we use the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's MiniCAM model to perform an integrated economic analysis of the penetration of PFIEVs and the resulting impact oil total U.S. CO2...
The state has different institutional capacities for providing finance capital to industrial sectors in different countries. These differences help explain the commercial nuclear energy sector's collapse in the United States and its success in France. The implications for institutional theories of political economy are explored. It is argued that to understand the state's ability to plan industrial development an analysis of its control over the processes of both internal and external capital formation is required.
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Fish occurrence data to support high-resolution distribution models and test various community and macroecological hypotheses have not been available at the national scale. We present IchthyMaps, a database of high-quality historical fish occurrences covering fishes of the conterminous United States. Designed on the principles of metacommunity ecology, IchthyMaps is a compilation of presence records from atlases up to 1990, at the resolution of the 1:100,000 National Hydrography Database Plus (NHDPlus) inter-confluence stream segment, readily aggregated into hierarchically coarser units (e.g. hydrologic unit code 8-digit and 12-digit watersheds). IchthyMaps contains about 606,550 presence records for 1,038 species...
Categories: Data, Publication; Types: Citation; Tags: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Biological Data, Biological sampling, All tags...
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Article Abstract: Although riparian and aquatic ecosystems make up a small fraction of the area in arid and semi-arid lands, they are critical for the survival of desert life. There are, however, few compendia of efforts to define the quantity of water needed to maintain these ecosystems and understand the risks and stressors to them. Through our analysis we found that 62% of the rivers examined in the deserts of the U.S. and Mexico have had just one study over the past four decades and 67% of studies used qualitative methods. Furthermore, only one-third of the 312 species catalogued in our work have been studied more than once and only 5% have been considered five or more times. The most common risks or stressors...
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This raster represents a continuous surface of sage-grouse habitat suitability index (HSI) values for Nevada during summer, which is a surrogate for habitat conditions during the sage-grouse brood-rearing period.
Concern over climate change has led the U.S. to consider a cap-and-trade system to regulate emissions. Here we illustrate the land-use impact to U.S. habitat types of new energy development resulting from different U.S. energy policies. We estimated the total new land area needed by 2030 to produce energy, under current law and under various cap-and-trade policies, and then partitioned the area impacted among habitat types with geospatial data on the feasibility of production. The land-use intensity of different energy production techniques varies over three orders of magnitude, from 1.9-2.8 km(2)/TW hr/yr for nuclear power to 788-1000 km(2)/TW hr/yr for biodiesel from soy. In all scenarios, temperate deciduous...
map background search result map search result map Estimated potential for sage-grouse movement Historical Stream Fish Distribution Database for the Conterminous United States (1950-1990): IchthyMaps Summer Season Habitat Suitability Index raster dataset Report and Publications: Assessing Evapotranspiration Rate Changes for Proposed Restoration of the Forested Uplands of the DLCC Environmental flows in the desert rivers of the United States and Mexico: Synthesis of available data and gap analysis Science Brief for Resource Managers: Metacommunity Dynamics of Gila River Fishes Estimated potential for sage-grouse movement Science Brief for Resource Managers: Metacommunity Dynamics of Gila River Fishes Report and Publications: Assessing Evapotranspiration Rate Changes for Proposed Restoration of the Forested Uplands of the DLCC Summer Season Habitat Suitability Index raster dataset Environmental flows in the desert rivers of the United States and Mexico: Synthesis of available data and gap analysis Historical Stream Fish Distribution Database for the Conterminous United States (1950-1990): IchthyMaps