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Ecosystem disturbances that remove vegetation and disturb surface soils are major causes of excessive soil erosion and can result in accelerated transport of soils contaminated with hazardous materials. Accelerated wind erosion in disturbed lands that are contaminated is of particular concern because of potential increased inhalation exposure, yet measurements regarding these relationships are lacking. The importance of this was highlighted when, in May of 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned over roughly 30% of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), mostly in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest, and through areas with soils containing contaminants, particularly excess depleted and natural uranium. Additionally,...
Semiarid forests across the western USA and elsewhere are being thinned to reduce risk from fire, restore previous ecological conditions, and/or salvage trees from recently burned areas. Prescriptions and monitoring for thinning generally focus on biotic characteristics of vegetation, like tree density, rather than abiotic characteristics of soils and their loss, which are usually only considered in association with water erosion. Recent studies indicate that sediment transport by wind in forests is substantial and can exceed water transport, yet forest wind erosion responses to tree thinning and/or burning are unknown. We measured wind-driven horizontal dust flux, a metric related to wind erosion, with respect...
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This dataset comprises GPS locations analyzed in Wilkinson et al. (2019): 14,478 deployed GPS locations, for 32 Eastern brown pelicans tracked during Hurricanes Irma, Florence, and Michael in autumn 2017 and 2018, respectively. Funding for this study was provided by the U.S. Geological Survey Ecosystem Missions Area, and facilitated by Mona Khalil (USGS). Among seabirds, the Eastern brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis) is a large-bodied coastal species inhabiting nearshore habitats. Breeding on sea islands free of mammalian predators in subtropical and tropical North America, colonies range in size from 10 - 5000 pairs. Egg laying (clutch size of 2-3 typical) occurs primarily in April and May, with...
    map background search result map search result map GPS tracking of Brown Pelican in the South Atlantic Bight during cyclonic activity (2017-2018) GPS tracking of Brown Pelican in the South Atlantic Bight during cyclonic activity (2017-2018)