The U.S. Geological Survey has launched a new Coastal Change Hazards website focused on coordinating research and delivering tools needed by coastal communities to respond to natural hazards along our Nation’s coastlines.
As Hurricane Sally approached the US Gulf Coast, the USGS Coastal Change Hazards team produced a series of forecasts for impacts on the beach. Forecasts were updated daily based on wave and storm surge forecasts from NOAA.
(Public domain.)
Our Nation’s coasts vary greatly, from relaxing sandy beaches and barrier islands, ecologically productive marshes, magnificent rocky coasts and cliffs, to tropical islands fringed by coral reefs and permafrost coasts where ice holds the sediments together. Each coastline is unique and faces different elements of coastal change.
Equally importantly, with more than 40% of the United States population inhabiting coastal counties, we must use the best available information and tools to reduce societal risk, protect natural resources, develop and
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A swarm of more than 400 earthquakes has hit California in the area between the San Andreas fault and the Imperial fault, with further seismic activity and potentially larger earthquakes set to follow over the next week.
The biggest earthquake that has been recorded in the swarm so far was a magnitude 4.9, which hit at 5.31 p.m. local time on September 30, but bigger quakes are a possibility.
“In a typical week, there is approximately a three in 10,000 chance of a magnitude 7+ earthquake in the vicinity of this swarm,’ the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said in a statement. “During this earthquake swarm, the probability of larger earthquakes in this region is significantly greater than usual. Currently, the swarm is rapidly evolving, and we expect to update this forecast with more specific probability information as we collect more data.”
The most likely scenario is that the rate of
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Symposia
Monday 9/28 Sessions
- Sagebrush ecosystem (USGS image).
Anthropogenic Subsidies and Wildlife: The Good, the Bad, and the Unintended Consequences of Food and Shelter Subsidies for Wildlife
Shawn O’Neil and others: Impacts of subsidized ravens on greater sage-grouse populations within sagebrush ecosystems of western North America.
Long-Term Data Sets for Biodiversity Monitoring, Research, and Management
John Sauer and others: Biometrics for Complex Long-Term Biodiversity Data Sets: Lessons from the Breeding Bird Survey
John R. Sauer; William A. Link; James E. Hines–Most of our understanding of changes in avian biodiversity in North America is based on analysis of population change from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). The BBS provides data at spatial scales ranging from individual survey locations to continental, but analyses at all scales are complicated by the need to accommodate detectability issues during sampling and changes in sampling effort over space and time. Over the years of
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